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THE NEW FREEDOM 

A CALL FOR THE EMANCIPATION 

OF THE GENEROUS ENERGIES 

OF A PEOPLE 



BY 

WOODROW WILSON 




NEW YORK AND GARDEN CITY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1913 



'i'^'^i^ 



Copyright, 1913, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scafidinavian 



//.(H5 



THIS BOOK 

I DEDICATE, WITH ALL MY HEART, TO EVERY MAN OE 

WOMAN WHO MAY DERIVE FROM IT, IN HOWEVER 

SMALL A DEGREE, THE IMPULSE OF 

UNSELFISH PUBLIC SERVICE 



PREFACE 

I have not written a book since the campaign. 
I did not write this book at all. It is the result 
of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William 
Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their 
^rig&rseqUences the more suggestive portions of 
my campaign speeches. 

And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. 
It is a discussion of a number of very vital sub- 
jects in the free form of extemporaneously 
spoken words. I have left the sentences in the 
form in which they were stenographically re- 
ported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going 
and often colloquial phraseology in which they 
were uttered from the platform, in the hope that 
they would seem the more fresh and spontane- 
ous because of their very lack of pruning and 
recasting. They have been suffered to run their 
unpremeditated course even at the cost of 
such repetition and redundancy as the extern- 



viii PREFACE 

poraneous speaker apparently inevitably falls 
into. 

The book is not a discussion of measures or 
of programs. It is an attempt to express the 
new spirit of our politics and to set forth, in 
large terms which may stick in the imagina- 
tion, what it is that must be done if we are to 
restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor 
again, and our national life, whether in trade, 
in industry, or in what concerns us only as 
families and individuals, to its purity, its self- 
respect, and its pristine strength and freedom. 
The New Freedom is only the old revived and 
clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern 
America. 

WooDRow Wilson. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Old Order Changeth ... 3 

II. What is Progress.? 33 

III. Freemen Need No Guardians . . 55 

IV. Life Comes from the Soil ... 79 
V. The Parliament of the People . . 90 

VI. Let There Be Light .... Ill 
VII. The Tariff —"Protection, " or Spe- 
cial Privilege.'^ 136 

VIII. Monopoly, or Opportunity? . . 163 

IX. Benevolence, or Justice.? . 192 

X. The Way to Resume is to Resume 223 

XI. The Emancipation of Business . 257 

XII. The Liberation of a People's Vital 

Energies 277 



THE NEW FREEDOM 



THE NEW FREEDOM 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 

THERE is one great basic fact which 
underhes all the questions that are dis- 
cussed on the political platform at the 
present moment. That singular fact is that 
nothing is done in this country as it was done 
twenty years ago. 

We are in the presence of a new organization 
of society. Our life has broken away from the 
past. The life of America is not the life that 
it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that 
it was ten years ago. We have changed our 
economic conditions, absolutely, from top to 
bottom; and, with our economic society, the 
organization of our life. The old political 
formulas do not fit the present problems; they 



4 THE NEW FREEDOM 

read now like documents taken out of a for- 
gotten age. The older cries sound as if they' 
belonged to a past age which men have almost 
forgotten. Things which used to be put intc 
the party platforms of ten years ago would* 
sound antiquated if put into a platform now. 
We are facing the necessity of fitting a new 
social organization, as we did once fit the old 
organization, to the happiness and prosperity 
of the great body of citizens ; for we are conscious 
that the new order of society has not been made 
to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity 
of the average man. The life of the nation has 
grown infinitely varied. It does not centre 
now upon questions of governmental structure 
or of the distribution of governmental powers. 
It centres upon questions of the very structure 
and operation of society itself, of which govern- 
ment is only the instrument. Our development 
has run so fast and so far along the lines sketched 
in the earlier day of constitutional definition, 
has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has 
piled upon them such novel structures of trust 
and combination, has elaborated within them 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 5 

a life so manifold, so full of forces which tran- 
scend the boundaries of the country itself and 
fill the eyes of the world, that a new nation 
seems to have been created which the old formu- 
las do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of. 

We have come upon a very different age from 
any that preceded us. We have come upon an 
age when we do not do business in the way in 
which we used to do business, — when we do 
not carry on any of the operations of manufac- 
ture, sale, transportation, or communication as 
men used to carry them on. There is a sense 
in which in our day the individual has been 
submerged. In most parts of our country men 
work, not for themselves, not as partners in the 
old way in which they used to work, but gener- 
ally as employees, — in a higher or lower grade, 
— of great corporations. There was a time when 
corporations played a very minor part in our 
business affairs, but now they play the chief part, 
and most men are the servants of corporations. 

You know what happens when you are the 
servant of a corporation. You have in no 
instance access to the men who are really deter- 






6 THE NEW FREEDOM 

mining the policy of the corporation. If the 
corporation is doing the things that it ought not 
to do, you really have no voice in the matter and 
must obey the orders, and you have oftentimes 
with deep mortification to co-operate in the do- 
ing of things which you know are against the 
public interest. Your individuality is swal- 
lowed up in the individuality and purpose of a 
great organization. 

It is true that, while most men are thus sub- 
merged in the corporation, a few, a very few, 
are exalted to a power which as individuals they 
could never have wielded. Through the great 
organizations of which they are the heads, a few 
are enabled to play a part unprecedented by any- 
thing in history in the control of the business 
operations of the country and in the determina- 
tion of the happiness of great numbers of people. 
^Yesterday, and ever since history began, men 
were related to one another as individuals/ 
To be sure there were the family, the Church, 
and the State, institutions which associated 
men in certain wide circles of relationship. 
But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 7 

ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt 
freely and directly with one another. To-day, 
the everyday relationships of men are largely 
with great impersonal concerns, with organiza- 
tions, not with other individual men. 

Now this is nothing short of a new social age, 
a new era of human relationships, a new stage- 
setting for the drama of life. 

In this new age we find, for instance, that our 
laws with regard to the relations of employer 
and employee are in many respects wholly 
antiquated and impossible. They were framed 
for another age, which nobody now living 
remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from 
our life that it would be difficult for many of us 
to understand it if it were described to us. 
The employer is now generally a corporation 
or a huge company of some kind; the employee 
is one of hundreds or of thousands brought 
together, not by individual masters whom they 
know and with whom they have personal rela- 
tions, but by agents of one sort or another. 
Workingmen are marshaled in great numbers 



8 THE NEW FREEDOM 

for the performance of a multitude of particular 
tasks under a common discipline. ' They gener- 
ally use dangerous and powerful machinery, 
over whose repair and renewal they have no 
control. New rules must be devised with re- 
gard to their obligations and their rights, their 
obligations to their employers and their responsi- 
bilities to one another. Rules must be devised 
for their protection, for their compensation 
when injured, for their support when disabled. 

There is something very new and very big 
and very complex about these new relations 
of capital and labor. A new economic society 
has sprung up, and we must effect a new set 
of adjustments. ' We must not pit power against 
weakness. The employer is generally, in our 
day, as I have said, not an individual, but a 
powerful group; and yet the workingman when 
dealing with his employer is still, under our 
existing law, an individual. 

WTiy is it that we have a labor question at all.^ 
It is for the simple and very sufficient reason 
that the laboring man and the employer are 
not intimate associates now as they used to 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 9 

I 

! be in time past. Most of our laws were formed 
in the age when employer and employees knew 
each other, knew each other's characters, were 
associates with each other, dealt with each other 
as man with man. That is no longer the case. 
You not only do not come into personal contact 
with the men who have the supreme command 
in those corporations, but it would be out of 
the question for you to do it. Our modern 
corporations employ thousands, and in some 
instances hundreds of thousands, of men. The 
only persons whom you see or deal with are 
local superintendents or local representatives 
of a vast organization, which is not like anything 
that the workingmen of the time in which our 
laws were framed knew anything about. A little 
group of workingmen, seeing their employer 
every day, dealing with him in a personal way, 
is one thing, and the modern body of labor en- 
gaged as employees of the huge enterprises that 
spread all over the country, dealing with men 
of whom they can form no personal conception, 
is another thing. A very different thing. You 
never saw a corporation, any more than you ever 



10 THE NEW FREEDOM 

saw a government. Many a workingman to-day 
never saw the body of men who are conducting 
the industry in which he is employed. And 
they never saw him. What they know about 
him is written in ledgers and books and letters, 
in the correspondence of the office, in the reports 
of the superintendents. He is a long way off 
from them. 

So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs 
which individuals intentionally do, — I do not 
believe there are a great many of those, — but 
the wrongs of a system. I want to record my 
protest against any discussion of this matter 
which would seem to indicate that there are 
bodies of our fellow-citizens who are trying 
to grind us down and do us injustice. There 
are some men of that sort. I don't know how 
they sleep o' nights, but there are men of that 
kind. Thank God, they are not numerous. 
The truth is, we are all caught in a great eco- 
nomic system which is heartless. The modern 
corporation is not engaged in business as an 
individual. WTien we deal with it, we deal 
with an impersonal element, an immaterial piece 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 11 

of society. A modern corporation is a means 
of co-operation in the conduct of an enterprise 
which is so big that no one man can conduct 
it, and which the resources of no one man are 
sufficient to finance. A company is formed; 
that company puts out a prospectus; the pro- 
moters expect to raise a certain fund as capital 
stock. Well, how are they going to raise it? 
They are going to raise it from the public in 
general, some of whom will buy their stock. 
The moment that begins, there is formed — 
what? A joint stock corporation. Men begin 
to pool their earnings, little piles, big piles. 
A certain number of men are elected by the 
stockholders to be directors, and these directors 
elect a president. This president is the head 
of the undertaking, and the directors are its 
managers. 

Now, do the workingmen employed by that 
stock corporation deal with that president and 
those directors? Not at all. Does the public 
deal with that president and that board of 
directors? It does not. Can anybody bring 
them to account? It is next to impossible to 



12 THE NEW FREEDOM 

do so. If you undertake it you will find it a 
game of hide and seek, with the objects of your 
search taking refuge now behind the tree of their 
individual personality, now behind that of their 
corporate irresponsibility. 

And do our laws take note of this curious 
state of things? Do they even attempt to dis- 
tinguish between a man's act as a corporation 
director and as an individual? They do not. 
Our laws still deal with us on the basis of the old 
system. The law is still living in the dead 
past which we have left behind. This is evi- 
dent, for instance, With regard to the matter of 
employers' liability for workingmen's injuries. 
Suppose that a super ntendent wants a work- 
man to use a certain piece of machinery which 
it is not safe for him to use, and that the work- 
man is injured by that piece of machinery. 
Some of our courts have held that the super- 
intendent is a fellow-servant, or, as the law 
states it, a fellow-employee, and that, therefore, 
the man cannot recover damages for his injury. 
The superintendent who probably engaged the 
man is not his employer. Who is his employer? 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 13 

And whose negligence could conceivably come 
in there? The board of directors did not tell 
the employee to use that piece of machinery; 
and the president of the corporation did not tell 
him to use that piece of machinery. And so 
forth. Don't you see by that theory that a 
man never can get redress for negligence on the 
part of the employer? When I hear judges 
reason upon the analogy of the relationships 
that used to exist between workmen and their 
employers a generation ago, I wonder if they 
have not opened their eyes to the modern world. 
You know, we have a right to expect that 
judges will have their eyes open, even though 
the law which they administer hasn't awakened. 
Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative 
of the diflSculties we are in because we have not 
adjusted the law to the facts of the new order. 

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had 
men's views confided to me privately. Some 
of the biggest men in the United States, in the 
field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid 
of somebody, are afraid of something. They 



14 THE NEW FREEDOM 

know that there is a power somewhere so organ- 
ized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so 
complete, so pervasive, that they had better 
not speak above their breath when they speak 
in condemnation of it. 

They know that America is not a place of 
which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man 
may choose his own calling and pursue it just 
as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; 
because to-day, if he enters certain fields, there 
are organizations which will use means against 
him that will prevent his building up a business 
which they do not want to have built up; organi- 
zations that will see to it that the ground is cut 
from under him and the markets shut against 
himT For if he begins to sell to certain retail 
dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will 
refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, 
afraid, will not buy the new man's wares. 

And this is the country which has lifted to the 
admiration of the world its ideals of absolutely 
free opportunity, where no man is supposed 
to be under any limitation except the limitations 
of his character and of his mind; where there is 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 15 

supposed to be no distinction of class, no dis- 
tinction of blood, no distinction of social status, 
but where men win or lose on their merits. 

I lay it very close to my own conscience as 
a public man whether we can any longer stand 
at our doors and welcome all newcomers upon 
those terms. American industry is not free, 
as once it was free; American enterprise is not 
free; the man with only a little capital is finding 
it harder to get into the field, more and more 
impossible to compete with the big fellow. 
Why.f* * Because the laws of this country do 
not prevent the strong from crushing the weak. 
That is the reason, and because the strong have 
crushed the weak the strong dominate the 
industry and the economic life of this country. 
No man can deny that the lines of endeavor 
have more and more narrowed and stiffened; 
no man who knows anything about the develop- 
ment of industry in this country can have failed 
to observe that the larger kinds of credit are 
more and more difficult to obtain, unless you 
obtain them upon the terms of uniting your 
efforts with those who already control the 



16 THE NEW FREEDOM 

industries of the country; and nobody can fail 
to observe that any man who tries to set himself 
up in competition with any process of manu- 
facture which has been taken under the control 
of large combinations of capital will presently 
find himself either squeezed out or obliged to 
sell and allow himself to be absorbed. 

There is a great deal that needs reconstruction 
in the United States. I should like to take a 
census of the business men, — I mean the rank 
and file of the business men, — as to whether they 
think that business conditions in this country, 
or rather whether the organization of busi- 
ness in this country, is satisfactory or not. 
I know what they would say if they dared. 
If they could vote secretly they would vote 
overwhelmingly that the present organization 
of business was meant for the big fellows and 
was not meant for the httle fellows; that it was 
meant for those who are at the top and was 
meant to exclude those who are at the bottom; 
that it was meant to shut out beginners, to 
prevent new entries in the race, to prevent the 
building up of competitive enterprises that would 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 17 

interfere with the monopohes which the great 
trusts have built up. 

What this country needs above everything 
else is a body of laws which will look after the 
men who are on the make rather than the men 
who are already made. Because the men who are 
already made are not going to live indefinitely, 
and they are not always kind enough to leave 
sons as able and as honest as they are. 

The originative part of America, the part of 
America that makes new enterprises, the part 
into which the ambitious and gifted working- 
man makes his way up, the class that saves, 
that plans, that organizes, that presently spreads 
its enterprises until they have a national scope 
and character, — that middle class is being 
more and more squeezed out by the processes 
which we have been taught to call processes of 
prosperity. Its members are sharing prosperity, 
no doubt; but what alarms me is that they are 
not originating prosperity. *No country can 
afford to have its prosperity originated by a 
small controlling class. The treasury of Amer- 
ica does not lie in the brains of the small body 



18 THE NEW FREEDOM 

of men now in control of the great enterprises 
that have been concentrated under the direction 
of a very small number of persons. The treas- 
ury of America lies in those ambitions, those 
energies, that cannot be restricted to a special 
favored classr It depends upon the inventions 
of unknown men, upon the originations of 
unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown 
men. Every country is renewed out of the 
ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of 
those already famous and powerful and in 
control. 

There has come over the land that un-Ameri- 
can set of conditions which enables a small 
number of men who control the government 
to get favors from the government; by those 
favors to exclude their fellows from equal 
business opportunity; by those favors to extend 
a network of control that will presently dominate 
every industry in the country, and so make men 
forget the ancient time when America lay in 
every hamlet, when America was to be seen 
in every fair valley, when America displayed 
her great forces on the broad prairies, ran her 



IHE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 19 

fine fires of enterprise up over the mountain- 
sides anc down into the bowels of the earth, 
and eager men were everywhere captains of 
industry, not employees; not looking to a 
distant city to find out what they might do, 
but looking about among their neighbors, 
finding credit according to their character, not 
according to their connections, finding credit 
in proportion to what was known to be in them 
and behind them, not in proportion to the 
securities they held that were approved where 
they were not known. In order to start an 
enterprise now, you have to be authenticated, 
in a perfectly impersonal way, not according 
to yourself, but according to what you own 
that somebody else approves of your owning. 
You cannot begin such an enterprise as those 
that have made America until you are so 
authenticated, until you have succeeded in 
obtaining the good-will of large alhed capital- 
ists. ' Is that freedom .^^ That is dependence, not 
freedom. 

We used to think in the old-fashioned days 
when life was very simple that all that govern- 



20 THE NEW FREEDOM 

ment had to do was to put on a pr liceman's 
uniform, and say, "Now don't any})ody hurt 
anybody else." We used to say that the ideal 
of government was for every man to be left 
alone and not interfered with, except when 
he interfered with somebody else; "and that 
the best government was the government that 
did as little governing as possible. That was 
the idea that obtained in Jefferson's time. 
But we are coming now to realize that life is 
so complicated that we are not dealing with the 
old conditions, and that the law has to step in 
and create new conditions under which we may 
live, the conditions which will make it tolerable 
for us to live. 

Let me illustrate what I mean : It used to be 
true in our cities that every family occupied 
a separate house of its own, that every family 
had its own little premises, that every family 
was separated in its life from every other family. 
That is no longer the case in our great cities. 
Families live in tenements, they live in flats, 
they live on floors; they are piled layer upon 
layer in the great tenement houses of our 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 21 

crowded districts, and not only are they piled 
layer upon layer, but they are associated room 
by room, so that there is in every room, some- 
times, in our congested districts, a separate 
family. In some foreign countries they have 
made much more progress than we in handling 
these things. In the city of Glasgow, for 
example (Glasgow is one of the model cities of 
the world), they have made up their minds 
that the entries and the hallways of great 
tenements are public streets. Therefore, the 
policeman goes up the stairway, and patrols 
the corridors; the lighting department of the 
city sees to it that the halls are abundantly 
lighted. The city does not deceive itself into 
supposing that that great building is a unit 
from which the police are to keep out and the 
civic authority to be excluded, but it says: 
"These are public highways, and light is needed 
in them, and control by the authority of the 
city." 

I liken that to our great modern industrial 
enterprises. A corporation is very like a large 
tenement house; it isn't the premises of a single 



22 THE NEW FREEDOM 

commercial family; it is just as much a public 
affair as a tenement house is a network of public 
highways. 

When you offer the securities of a great 
corporation to anybody who wishes to purchase 
them, you must open that corporation to the 
inspection of everybody who wants to purchase. 
There must, to follow out the figure of the 
tenement house, be fights along the corridors, 
there must be pofice patrolfing the openings, 
there must be inspection wherever it is known 
that men may be deceived with regard to the 
contents of the premises. If we believe that 
fraud lies in wait for us, we must have the 
means of determining whether our suspicions 
are well founded or not. Similarly, the treat- 
ment of labor by the great corporations is not 
what it was in Jefferson's time. WTienever 
bodies of men employ bodies of men, it ceases 
to be a private relationship. So that when 
courts hold that workingmen cannot peaceably 
dissuade other workingmen from taking em- 
ployment, as was held in a notable case in 
New Jersey, they simply show that their 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 23 

minds and understandings are lingering in 
an age which has passed away. This deahng 
of great bodies of men with other bodies of men 
is a matter of pubhc scrutiny, and should be 
a matter of public regulation. 

Similarly, it was no business of the law in 
the time of Jefferson to come into my house and 
see how I kept house. But when my house, 
when my so-called private property, became a 
great mine, and men went along dark corridors 
amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out 
of the bowels of the earth things necessary for 
the industries of a whole nation, and when it 
came about that no individual owned these 
mines, that they were owned by great stock 
companies, then all the old analogies absolutely 
collapsed and it became the right of the govern- 
ment to go down into these mines to see whether 
human beings were properly treated in them or 
not; lo see whether accidents were properly 
safeguarded against; to see whether modern 
economical methods of using these inestimable 
riches of the earth were followed or were not 
followed. If somebody puts a derrick im- 



24 THE NEW FREEDOM 

properly secured on top of a building or over- 
topping the street, then the government of the 
city has the right to see that that derrick is 
so secured that you and I can walk under it and 
not be afraid that the heavens are going to fall 
on us. Likewise, in these great beehives where 
in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, 
it is the privilege of the government, whether 
of the State or of the United States, as the case 
may be, to see that human life is protected, that 
human lungs have something to breathe. 

These, again, are merely illustrations of con- 
ditions. We are in a new world, struggling 
under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives 
to-day, surveying this new scene of centralized 
and complex society, we shall find many more 
things out of joint. 

One of the most alarming phenomena of the 
time, — or rather it would be alarming if the 
nation had not awakened to it and shown its 
determination to control it, — one of the most 
significant signs of the new social era is the 
degree to which government has become as- 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 25 

sociated with business. I speak, for the 
moment, of the control over the government 
exercised by Big Business. ^ Behind the whole 
subject, of course, is the truth that, in the new 
order, government and business must be as- 
sociated closely. But that association is at 
present of a nature absolutely intolerable; the 
precedence is wrong, the association is upside 
down. 'Our government has been for the past 
few years under the control of heads of great 
allied corporations with special interests. It has 
not controlled these interests and assigned 
them a proper place in the whole system of 
business; it has submitted itself to their control. 
As a result, there have g own up vicious systems 
and schemes of governmental favoritism (the 
most obvious being the extravagant tariff), 
far-reaching in effect upon the whole fabric 
of life, touching to his injury every inhabitant 
of the land, laying unfair and impossible handi- 
caps upon competitors, imposing taxes in every 
direction, stifling everywhere the free spirit of 
American enterprise. 

Now this has come about naturally; as we 



26 THE NEW FREEDOM 

go on we shall see how veiy naturally. It is 
no use denouncing anybody, or anything, except 
human nature. 'Nevertheless, it is an intoler- 
able thing that the government of the republic 
should have got so far out of the hands of the 
people; should have been captured by interests 
which are special and not general. In the train 
of this capture follow the troops of scandals, 
wrongs, indecencies, with which our politics 
swarm. 

There are cities in America of whose govern- 
ment we are ashamed. There are cities every- 
where, in every part of the land, in which we 
feel that, not the interests of the public, but the 
interests of special privileges, of selfish men, are 
served; where contracts take precedence over 
public interest. Not only in big cities is this 
the case. Have you not noticed the growth 
of sociahstic sentiment in the smaller towns .^ 
Not many months ago I stopped at a little town 
in Nebraska, and while my train lingered I met 
on the platform a very engaging young fellow 
dressed in overalls who introduced himself 
to me as the mayor of the town, and added 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 27 

that he was a Socialist. I said, " What does 
that mean? Does that mean that this town is 
socialistic?" "No, sir," he said; * 'I have not 
deceived myself; the vote by which I was 
elected was about 20 per cent, socialistic and 
80 per cent, protest." It was protest against 
the treachery to the people of those who led 
both the other parties of that town. 

All over the Union people are coming to feel 
that they have no control over the course of 
affairs. I live in one of the greatest States in 
the union, which was at one time in slavery. 
Until two years ago we had witnessed with 
increasing concern the growth in New Jersey 
of a spirit of almost cynical despair. Men said: 
"We vote; we are offered the platform we want; 
we elect the men who stand on that platform, 
and we get absolutely nothing." So they began 
to ask: "What is the use of voting? We know 
that the machines of both parties are subsidized 
by the same persons, and therefore it is useless 
to turn in either direction." 

This is not confined to some of the state govern- 
ments and those of some of the towns and cities. 



28 THE NEW FREEDOM 

We know that something intervenes between 
the people of the United States and the control 
of their own affairs at Washington. It is not 
the people who have been ruling there of late. 

Why are we in the presence, why are we at 
the threshold, of a revolution? Because we 
are profoundly disturbed by the influences 
which we see reigning in the determination of 
our public life and our public policy. There 
was a time when America was blithe with self- 
confidence. She boasted that she, and she 
alone, knew the processes of popular govern- 
ment; but now she sees her sky overcast; she 
sees that there are at work forces which she 
did not dream of in her hopeful youth. 

Don't you know that some man with eloquent 
tongue, without conscience, who did not care 
for the nation, could put this whole country 
into a flame? ' Don't you know that this country 
from one end to the other believes that something 
is wrong? What an opportunity it would be 
for some man without conscience to spring up 
and say: "This is the way. Follow me!" 
— and lead in paths of destruction ! 



— THE ULD ORDER CHAJNGETH 29 

The old order changeth — cliangeth under 
our very eyes, not quietly and equably, but 
swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult 
of reconstruction. 

I suppose that all struggle for law has been 
conscious, that very little of it has been blind 
or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to say, 
as if with superior knowledge of affairs and of 
human weakness, that every age has been an 
age of transition, and that no age is more full 
of change than another; yet in very few ages 
of the world can the struggle for change have 
been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so 
great a scale as in this in which we are taking 
part. 

The transition we are witnessing is no equable 
transition of growth and normal alteration; 
no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age 
into another, its natural heir and successor. 
Society is looking itself over, in our day, from top 
to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis 
of its very elements; is questioning its oldest 
practices as freely as its newest, scrutinizing 
every arrangement and motive of its life; and 



30 THE NEW FREEDOM 

it stands ready to attempt nothing less than 
a radical reconstruction, which only frank and 
honest counsels and the forces of generous 
co-operation can hold back from becoming a 
revolution. ~ We are in a temper to reconstruct 
economic society, as we were once in a temper 
to reconstruct political society, and political 
society may itself undergo a radical modification 
in the process. I doubt if any age was ever 
more conscious of its task or more unanimously 
desirous of radical and extended changes in its 
economic and political practice. 
~ I We stand in the presence of a revolution, — 
not a bloody revolution; America is not given 
to the spilling of blood, — but a silent revolution, 
whereby America will insist upon recovering 
in practice those ideals which she has always 
professed, upon securing a government devoted 
to the general interest and not to special interests. 
We are upon the eve of a great reconstruction. 
It calls for creative statesmanship as no age 
has done since that great age in which we set 
up the government under which we live, that 
government which was the admiration of the 



THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH 31 

world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under 
it which have made many of our own com- 
patriots question the freedom of our institutions 
and preach revolution against them. I do not 
fear revolution. I have unshaken faith in the 
power of America to keep its self-possession. 
Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it 
came when we put aside the crude government 
of the Confederation and created the great 
Federal Union which governs individuals, not 
States, and which has been these hundred and 
thirty years our vehicle of progress. Some 
radical changes we must make in our law and 
practice. Some reconstructions we must push 
forward, which a new age and new circumstances 
impose upon us. But we can do it all in calm 
and sober fashion, like statesmen and patriots. 

I do not speak of these things in apprehension, 
because all is open and above-board. This is 
not a day in which great forces rally in secret. 
The whole stupendous program must be 
publicly planned and canvassed. Good temper, 
the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the 
energy of thoughtful and unselfish men, the 



32 THE NEW FREEDOM 

habit of co-operation and of compromise which 
has been bred in us by long years of free govern- 
ment, in which reason rather than passion has 
been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of 
candid and universal debate, will enable us 
to win through to still another great age without 
violence, i- 



n 

WHAT IS PROGRESS? 

IN THAT sage and veracious chronicle, 
"Alice Through the Looking-Glass," it is 
recounted how, on a noteworthy occasion, 
the little heroine is seized by the Red Chess 
Queen, who races her off at a terrific pace. They 
run until both of them are out of breath; then 
they stop, and Alice looks around her and says, 
"Why, we are just where we were when we 
started!" "Oh, yes," says the Red Queen; 
"you have to run twice as fast as that to get 
anywhere else." 

That is a parable of progress. The laws of 
this country have not kept up with the change 
of economic circumstances in this country; they 
have not kept up with the change of political 
circumstances; and therefore we are not even 
where we were when we started. We shall 
have to run, not until we are out of breath, but 

33 



34 THE NEW FREEDOM 

until we have caught up with our own condi- 
tions, before we shall be where we were when we 
started; when we started this great experiment 
which has been the hope and the beacon of the 
world. And we should have to run twice as 
fast as any rational program I have seen in 
Order to get anywhere else. 

I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if 
for no other reason, because we have not kept 
up with our changes of conditions, either in the 
economic field or in the political field. We 
have not kept up as well as other nations have. 
We have not kept our practices adjusted to the 
facts of the case, and until we do, and unless we 
do, the facts of the case will always have the 
better of the argument; because if you do not 
adjust your laws to the facts, so much the worse 
for the laws, not for the facts, because law trails 
along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe 
which runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it 
and makes it follow the will-o'-the-wisps of 
imaginative projects. -I 

Business is in a situation in America which it 
was never in before; it is in a situation to which 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 35 

we have not adjusted our laws. Our laws are 
still meant for business done by individuals; 
they have not been satisfactorily adjusted to 
business done by great combinations, and we 
have got to adjust them. I do not say we may 
or may not; I say we must; there is no choice. 
If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are 
not injured, the law is damaged; because the 
law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the ex- 
pression of the facts in legal relationships. 
Laws have never altered the facts; laws have 
always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted 
interests as they have arisen and have changed 
toward one another. 

Politics in America is in a case which sadly 
requires attention. The system set up by our 
law and our usage doesn't work, — or at least it 
can't be depended on; it is made to work only 
by a most unreasonable expenditure of labor 
and pains. The government, which was de- 
signed for the people, has got into the hands of 
bosses and their employers, the special interests. 
An invisible empire has been set up above the 
forms of democracy. 



36 THE NEW FREEDOM 

There are serious things to do. Does any 
man doubt the great discontent in this coun- 
try? Does any man doubt that there are 
grounds and justifications for discontent? Do 
we dare stand still? Within the past few months 
we have witnessed (along with other strange 
political phenomena, eloquently significant of 
popular uneasiness) on one side a doubling of the 
Socialist vote and on the other the posting on 
dead walls and hoardings all over the country of 
certain very attractive and diverting bills 
warning citizens that it was "better to be safe 
than sorry" and advising them to "let well 
enough alone." Apparently a good many citi- 
zens doubted whether the situation they were 
advised to let alone was really well enough, and 
concluded that they would take a chance of 
being sorry. To me, these counsels of do- 
nothingism, these counsels of sitting still for 
fear something would happen, these counsels 
addressed to the hopeful, energetic people of 
the United States, telling them that they are 
not wise enough to touch their own affairs with- 
out marring them, constitute the most extraordi- 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 37 

nary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. 
Americans are not yet cowards. True, their self- 
rehance has been sapped by years of submission 
to the doctrine that prosperity is something 
that benevolent magnates provide for them with 
the aid of the government; their self-rehance 
has been weakened, but not so utterly de- 
stroyed that you can twit them about it. The 
American people are not naturally stand-pat- 
ters. Progress is the word that charms their 
ears and stirs their hearts. 

There are, of course, Americans who have not 
yet heard that anything is going on. The 
circus might come to town, have the big parade 
and go, without their catching a sight of the 
camels or a note of the calliope. There are 
people, even Americans, who never move them- 
selves or know that anything else is moving. 
^ A friend of mine who had heard of the Florida 
"cracker," as they call a certain ne'er-do-weel por- 
tion of the population down there, when passing 
through the State in a train, asked some one to 
point out a "cracker" to him. The man asked 
replied, "Well, if you see something off in the 



38 THE NEW FREEDOM 

woods that looks brown, like a stump, you will 
know it is either a stu^iip or a cracker; if it 
moves, it is a stump." (:;^^ 

Now, movement has no virtue in itself. 
Change is not worth while for its own sake. I 
am not one of those who love variety for its own 
sake. If a thing is good to-day, I should like 
to have it stay that way to-morrow. Most of 
our calculations in life are dependent upon 
things staying the way they are. For example, 
if, when you got up this morning, you had for- 
gotten how to dress, if you had forgotten all 
about those ordinary things which you do al- 
most automatically, which you can almost do 
half awake, you would have to find out what you 
did yesterday. I am told by the psychologists 
that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, 
I should not know who I am to-day, and that, 
therefore, my very identity depends upon my 
being able to tally to-day with yesterday. If 
they do not tally, then I am confused ; I do not 
know who I am, and I have to go around and 
ask somebody to tell me my name and where I 
came from. 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 39 

I am not one of those who wish to break con- 
nection with the past; I am not one of those who 
wish to change for the mere sake of variety. 
The only men who do that are the men who want 
to forget something, the men who filled yesterday 
with something th^y would rather not recollect 
to-day, and so go about seeking diversion, 
seeking abstraction in something that will blot 
out recollection, or seeking to put something 
into them which will blot out all recollec- 
tion. Change is not worth while unless it is im- 
provement. If I move out of my present house 
because I do not like it, then I have got to 
choose a better house, or build a better house, to 
justify the change. 

It would seem a waste of time to point out 
that ancient distinction, — between mere change 
and improvement. Yet there is a class of mind 
that is prone to confuse them. We have had 
political leaders whose conception of greatness 
was to be forever frantically doing something, — 
it mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, 
without sense of the energy of concentration, 
knowing only the energy of succession. Now, 



40 THE NEW FREEDOM 

life does not consist of eternally running to a fire. 
There is no virtue in going any whiere unless you 
will gain something by being there. The direction 
is just as important as the impetus of motion. 

All progress depends on how fast you are 
going, and where you are going, and I fear there 
has been too much of this thing of knowing 
neither how fast we were going or where we 
were going. I have my private belief that we 
have been doing most of our progressiveness after 
the fashion of those things that in my boyhood 
days we called "treadmills," — a treadmill being 
a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which 
some poor devil of a mule was forced to walk 
forever without getting anywhere. Elephants 
and even other animals have been known to 
turn treadmills, making a good deal of noise, 
and causing certain wheels to go round, and I 
daresay grinding out some sort of product for 
somebody, but without achieving much prog- 
ress. Lately, in an effort to persuade the ele- 
phant to move, really, his friends tried dynamite. 
It moved, — in separate and scattered parts, 
but it moved. 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 41 

A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a 
book, not long ago, that it was a mistake to 
say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent 
in his line of business, that you could not bribe 
a man like that, because, he said, the point 
about such men is that they have been bribed 
— not in the ordinary meaning of that word, not 
in any gross, corrupt sense, but they have 
achieved their great success by means of the 
existing order of things and therefore they have 
been put under bonds to see that that existing 
order of things is not changed; they are bribed 
to maintain the status quo. 

It was for that reason that I used to say, 
when I had to do with the administration of an 
educational institution, that I should like to 
make the young gentlemen of the rising genera- 
tion as unlike their fathers as possible. Not 
because their fathers lacked character or intel- 
ligence or knowledge or patriotism, but because 
their fathers, by reason of their advancing years 
and their established position in society, had 
lost touch with the processes of life; they had 
forgotten what it was to begin; they had for- 



42 THE NEW FREEDOM 

gotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten 
what it was to be dominated by the circum- 
stances of their Hfe on their way up from the 
bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out 
of sympathy with the creative, formative and 
progressive forces of society. 

Progress! Did you ever reflect that that 
word is almost a new one? No word comes 
more often or more naturally to the lips of 
modern man, as if the thing it stands for were 
almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men 
through many thousand years never talked or 
thought of progress. They thought in the other 
direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory 
were tales of the past. The ancestor wore the 
heavier armor and carried the larger 
spear. "There were giants in those days." 
Now all that has altered. We think of the 
future, not the past, as the more glorious time 
in comparison with which the present is 
nothing. Progress, development, — those 
are modern words. The modern idea is to 
leave the past and press onward to something 
new. 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 43 

But what is progress going to do with the 
past, and with the present? How is it going 
to treat them? With ignominy, or respect? 
Should it break with them altogether, or rise 
out of them, with its roots still deep in the older 
time? W^hat attitude shall progressives take 
toward the existing order, toward those insti- 
tutions of conservatism, the Constitution, the 
laws, and the courts? 

Are those thoughtful men who fear that we 
are now about to disturb the ancient founda- 
tions of our institutions justified in their fear? 
If they are, we ought to go very slowly about 
the processes of change. If it is indeed true 
that we have grown tired of the institutions 
which w^e have so carefully and sedulously built 
up, then we ought to go very slowly and very 
carefully about the very dangerous task of 
altering them. We ought, therefore, to ask 
ourselves, first of all, whether thought in this 
country is tending to do anything by which 
we shall retrace our steps, or by which 
we shall change the whole direction of our 
development? 



44 THE NEW FREEDOM 

I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up 
ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of 
liberty in soil which is not native to it. I be- 
lieve that the ancient traditions of a people are 
its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon 
which to write a political program. You cannot 
take a new sheet of paper and determine what 
your life shall be to-morrow. You must knit 
the new into the old. You cannot put a new 
patch on an old garment without ruining it; it 
must be not a patch, but something woven into 
the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, 
of the same texture and intention. If I did not 
believe that to be progressive was to preserve 
the essentials of our institutions, I for one could 
not be a progressive. _ y 

One of the chief benefits I used to derive from 
being president of a university was that I had 
the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from 
all over the world. I cannot tell you how much 
has dropped into my granary by their presence. 
I had been casting around in my mind for some- 
thing by which to draw several parts of my 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 45 

political thought together when it was my good 
fortune to entertain a very interesting Scots- 
man who had been devoting himself to the philo- 
sophical thought of the seventeenth century. 
His talk was so engaging that it was delightful 
to hear him speak of anything, and presently 
there came out of the unexpected region of his 
thought the thing I had been waiting for. He 
called my attention to the fact that in every 
generation all sorts of speculation and thinking 
tend to fall under the formula of the dominant 
thought of the age. For example, after the 
Newtonian Theory of the universe had been 
developed, almost all thinking tended to express 
itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, 
and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned 
amongst us, everybody is likely to express what- 
ever he wishes to expound in terms of develop- 
ment and accommodation to environment. 

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man 
talked, that the Constitution of the United 
States had been made under the dominion of the 
Newtonian Theory. You have only to read 
the papers of The Federalist to see that fact 



46 THE NEW FREEDOM 

written on every page. They speak of the 
"checks and balances" of the Constitution, and 
use to express their idea the simile of the organi- 
zation of the universe, and particularly of the 
solar system, — how by the attraction of gravi- 
tation the various parts are held in their orbits; 
and then they proceed to represent Congress, 
the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of 
imitation of the solar system,. j)>l^ 

They were only following the English Whigs, 
who gave Great Britain its modem constitu- 
tion. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the 
matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen 
care little for theories. It was a Frenchman, 
Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how 
faithfully they had copied Newton's description 
of the mechanism of the heavens. 

f The makers of our Federal Constitution read 

I Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. 

i They were scientists in their way, — the best way 

of their age, — those fathers of the nation. Jef- 

\ ferson wrote of "the laws of Nature," — and 

then by way of afterthought, — "and of 

J Nature's God." And they constructed a gov- 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 47 

ernment as they would have constructed an 
orrery, — to display the laws of nature. \t>/Poli- 
tics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. 
The Constitution was founded on the law of 
gravitation. The government was to exist and 
move by virtue of the efficacy of "checks and 
balances." 

1^ The trouble with the theory is that govern- 
ment is not a machine, but a living thing. It 
falls, not under the theory of the universe, but 
under the theory of organic life. It is account- 
able to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified 
by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, 
shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of 
life. No livijig thing can have its organs offset 
against each other, as checks, and live. On the 
contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick 
co-operation, their ready response to the com- 
mands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable 
community of purpose. Government is not a 
body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with 
highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our 
modern day, of specialization, with a common 
task and purpose. Their co-operation is indis- 



48 THE JNEVV FREEDOM 

pensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no 
successful government without the intimate, 
instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life 
and action. This is not theory, but fact, and 
displays its force as fact, whatever theories may 
be thrown across its track. Living political 
constitutions must be Darwinian in structure 
and in practice. Society is a living organism 
and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics ; 
it must develop. 

All that progressives ask or desire is permis- 
sion — in an era when "development," "evolu- 
tion," is the scientific word^ — to interpret the 
Constitution according to the Darwinian prin- 
ciple; all they ask is recognition of the fact that 
a nation is a living thing and not a machine. 

Some citizens of this country have never got 
beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed 
in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms 
swell against George III, but they have no con- 
sciousness of the war for freedom that is going 
on to-day. 
/ The Declaration of Independence did not 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 49 

mention the questions of our day. It is of no 
consequence to us unless we can translate its 
general terms into examples of the present day 
and substitute them in some vital way for the 
examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately 
involved in the circumstancs of the day in which 
it was conceived and written. It is an emi- 
nently practical document, meant for the use of 
practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, 
but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of govern- 
ment, but a program of action. Unless we 
can translate it into the questions of our own 
day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons 
of the sires who acted in response to its chal- 
lenge. 

What form does the contest between tyranny 
and freedom take to-day? What is the special 
form of tyranny we now fight? How does it 
endanger the rights of the people, and what do 
we mean to do in order to make our contest 
against it effectual? What are to be the items 
of our new declaration of independence? 

By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean con- 
trol of the law, of legislation and adjudication. 



50 THE NEW FREEDOM 

by organizations which do not represent the 
people, by means which are private and selfish. 
We mean, specifically, the conduct of our affairs 
and the shaping of our legislation in the interest 
of special bodies of capital and those who or- 
ganize their use. W^e mean the alliance, for this 
purpose, of political machines with selfish busi- 
ness. We mean the exploitation of the people 
by legal and pohtical means. We have seen 
many of our governments under these influences 
cease to be representative governments, cease 
to be governments representative of the people, 
and become governments representative of 
special interests, controlled by machines, which 
in their turn are not controlled by the people. 

Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our 
economic system, it seems to me as if, leaving our 
law just about where it was before any of the 
modern inventions or developments took place, 
we had simply at haphazard extended the 
family residence, added an office here and a 
workroom there, and a new set of sleeping rooms 
there, built up higher on our foundations, and 
put out little lean-tos on the side, until we have 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 51 

a structure that has no character whatever. 
Now, the problem is to continue to Hve in the 
house and yet change it. 

Well, we are architects in our time, and our 
architects are also engineers. W^e don't have 
to stop using a railroad terminal because a new 
station is being built. We don't have to stop 
any of the processes of our lives because we are 
rearranging the structures in which we conduct 
those processes. W^hat we have to undertake 
is to systematize the foundations of the house, 
then to thread all the old parts of the structure 
with the steel which will be laced together in 
modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern 
knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, 
and then slowly change the partitions, relay 
the walls, let in the light through new apertures, 
improve the ventilation; until finally, a genera- 
tion or two from now, the scaffolding will be 
taken away, and there will be the family in a 
great building whose noble architecture will at 
last be disclosed, where men can live as a single 
community, co-operative as in a perfected, co- 
ordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of 



52 THE NEW FREEDOM 

nature, not afraid of any artificial storm, any 
imitation of thunder and lightning, knowing 
that the foundations go down to the bedrock of 
principle, and knowing that whenever they 
please they can change that plan again and 
accommodate it as they please to the altering 

necessities of their lives. . 

But there are a great many men who don't 
like the idea. Some wit recently said, in view of 
the fact that most of our American architects 
are trained in a certain Ecole in Paris, that all 
American architecture in recent years was either 
bizarre or "Beaux Arts." I think that our 
economic architecture is decidedly bizarre; and 
I am afraid that there is a good deal to learn 
about matters other than architecture from the 
same source from which our architects have 
learned a great many things. I don't mean the 
School of Fine Arts at Paris, but the experience 
of France; for from the other side of the water 
men can now hold up against us the reproach 
that we have not adjusted our lives to modern 
conditions to the same extent that they have 
adjusted theirs. I was very much interested in 



WHAT IS PROGRESS 53 

some of the reasons given by our friends across 
the Canadian border for being very shy about 
the reciprocity arrangements. They said: "We 
are not sure whither these arrangements will 
lead, and we don't care to associate too closely 
with the economic conditions of the United 
States until those conditions are as modern as 
ours." And when I resented it, and asked for 
particulars, I had, in regard to many matters, 
to retire from the debate. Because I found that 
they had adjusted their regulations of economic 
development to conditions we had not yet found 

a way to meet in the United States. . 

Well, we have started now at all events. The 
procession is under way. ^ The stand-patter 
doesn't know there is a procession. He is 
asleep in the back part of his house. He doesn't 
know that the road is resounding with the tramp 
of men going to the front. And when he wakes 
up, the country will be empty. He will be 
deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. 
Nothing has happened. The world has been 
going on. The world has a habit of going on. 
The world has a habit of leaving those behind 



54 THE NEW FREEDOM 

who won't go with it. The world has always 
neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the 
stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he 
excites my sympathy. He is going to be so 
lonely before it is all over. -And we are good 
fellows, we are good company; why doesn't he 
come along .f^ We are not going to do him any 
harm. We are going to show him a good time. 
We are going to climb the slow road until it 
reaches some upland where the air is fresher, 
where the whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, 
where men can look in each other's faces and 
see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they 
have to talk about they are willing to talk about 
in the open and talk about with each other; and 
whence, looking back over the road, we shall see 
at last that we have fulfilled our promise to man- 
kind. We had said to all the world, "America 
was created to break every kind of monopoly, 
and to set men free, upon a footing of equality, 
upon a footing of opportunity, to match their 
brains and their energies." and now we have 
proved that we meant it. 



in 

FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 

THERE are two theories of government 
that have been contending with each 
other ever since government began. 
One of them is the theory which in America 
is associated with the name of a very great man, 
Alexander Hamilton. A great man, but, in my 
judgment, not a great American. He did not 
think in terms of American life. Hamilton 
ibelieved that the only people who could under- 
stand government, and therefore the only people 
who were qualified to conduct it, were the men 
who had the biggest financial stake in the com- 
mercial and industrial enterprises of the country. 
That theory, though few have now the hardi- 
hood to profess it openly, has been the working 
theory upon which our government has lately 
been conducted. It is astonishing how persis- 
tent it is. It is amazing how quickly the politi- 

55 



36 THE NEW FREEDOM 

cal party which had Liiicohi for its first leader, 
— Lincoln, who not only denied, but in his own 
person so completely disproved the aristocratic 
theory, — it is amazing how quickly that party, 
founded on faith in the people, forgot the pre- 
cepts of Lincoln and fell under the delusion that 
the "masses" needed the guardianship of "men 
of affairs." 

For indeed, if you stop to think about it, 
nothing could be a greater departure from origi- 
nal Americanism, from faith in the ability of 
a confident, resourceful, and independent people, 
than the discouraging doctrine that somebody 
has got to provide prosperity for the rest of us. 
And yet that is exactly the doctrine on which the 
government of the United States has been con- 
ducted lately. Who have been consulted when 
important measures of government, like tariff 
acts, and currency acts, and railroad acts, were 
under consideration? The people whom the 
tariff chiefly affects, the people for whom the 
currency is supposed to exist, the people who 
pay the duties and ride on the railroads? Oh, 
no! What do they know about such matters! 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 57 

The gentlemen whose ideas have been sought are 
the big manufacturers, the bankers, and the 
heads of the great railroad combinations. The 
masters of the government of the United States 
are the combined capitalists and manufacturers 
of the United States. It is written over every 
intimate page of the records of Congress, it is 
written all through the history of conferences at 
the White House, that the suggestions of eco- 
nomic policy in this country have come from one 
source, not from many sources. The benevolent 
guardians, the kind-hearted trustees who have 
taken the troubles of government off our hands, 
have become so conspicuous that almost any- 
body can write out a list of them. They have 
become so conspicuous that their names are 
mentioned upon almost every political platform. 
The men who have undertaken the interesting 
job of taking care of us do not force us to requite 
them with anonymously directed gratitude. 
We know them by name. 

Suppose you go to Washington and try to get 
at your government. You will always find that 
while you are politely listened to, the men 



58 THE NEW FREEDOM 

really consulted are the men who have the big- 
gest stake, — the big bankers, the big manu- 
facturers, the big masters of commerce, the heads 
of railroad corporations and of steamship cor- 
porations. I have no objection to these men 
being consulted, because they also, though they 
do not themselves seem to admit it,*are part of 
the people of the United States. But I do very 
seriously object to these gentlemen being chiefly 
consulted, and particularly to their being ex- 
clusively consulted, for, if the government of 
the United States is to do the right thing by the 
people of the United States, it has got to do it 
directly and not through the intermediation of 
these gentlemen. Every time it has come to a 
critical question these gentlemen have been 
yielded to, and their demands have been treated 
as the demands that should be followed as a 
matter of course. 

The government of the United States at pres- 
ent is a foster-child of the special interests. It 
is not allowed to have a will of its own. It is 
told at every move: "Don't do that; you will 
interfere with our prosperity." And when we 









FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 39 

ask, "Where is our prosperity lodged?" a 
certain group of gentlemen say, "With us." 
The government of the United States in recent f 
years has not been administered by the common I 
people of the United States. You know just as j 
well as I do, — it is not an indictment against 
anybody, it is a mere statement of the facts, — 
that the people have stood outside and looked 
on at their own government and that all they 
have had to determine in past years has been 
which crowd they would look on at; whether 
they would look on at this little group or that 
little group who had managed to get the control 
of affairs in its hands. Have you ever heard, 
for example, of any hearing before any great 
committee of the Congress in which the people 
of the country as a whole were represented, ex- 
cept it may be by the Congressmen themselves? 
The men who appear at those meetings in order 
to argue for or against a schedule in the tariff, 
for this measure or against that measure, are 
men who represent special interests. They may 
represent them very honestly, they may intend 
no wrong to their fellow-citizens, but they are 



(50 THE NEW FREEDOM 

speaking from the point of view always of a 
small portion of the population. I have some- 
times wondered why men, particularly men of 
means, men who didn't have to work for their 
living, shouldn't constitute themselves attorneys 
for the people, and every time a hearing is held 
before a committee of Congress should not go 
and ask: "Gentlemen, in considering these 
things suppose you consider the whole country? 
Suppose you consider the citizens of the United 
States?" 

'. I don't want a smug lot of experts to sit 
down behind closed doors in Washington and 
play Providence to me. There is a Providence 
to which I am perfectly willing to submit. But 
as for other men setting up as Providence over 
myself, I seriously object. I have never met 
a political savior in the flesh, and I never 
expect to meet one. I am reminded of Gillet 
Burgess' verses: 

I never saw a purple cow, 

I never hope to see one. 
But this I'll tell you anyhow, 

I'd rather see than be one. 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 61 

That is the way I feel about this saving of my 
fellow-countrymen. I'd rather see a savior of 
the United States than set up to be one; be- 
cause I have found out, I have actually found 
out, that men I consult with know more than I 
do, — especially if I consult with enough of 
them. I never came out of a committee meet- 
ing or a conference without seeing more of the 
question that was under discussion than I had 
seen when I went in. And that to my mind is 
an image of government. I am not willing to 
be under the patronage of the trusts, no matter 
how providential a government presides over 
the process of their control of my life. 

I am one of those who absolutely reject the 
trustee theory, the guardianship theory./ I 
have never found a man who knew how to take 
care of me, and, reasoning from that point out, I 
conjecture that there isn't any man who knows 
how to take care of all the people of the United 
States. I suspect that the people of the United 
States understand their own interests better 
than any group of men in the confines of the 
country understand them. The men who are 



62 THE NEW FREEDOM 

sweating blood to get their foothold in the 
world of endeavor understand the conditions of 
business in the United States very much better 
than the men who have arrived and are at the 
top. They know what the thing is that they 
are struggling against. They know how dif- 
ficult it is to start a new enterprise. They know 
how far they have to search for credit that will 
put them upon an even footing with the men 
who have already built up industry in this coun- 
try. 'They know that somewhere, by some- 
body, the development of industry is being 
controlled. 

I do not say this with the slightest desire to 
create any prejudice against wealth; on the con- 
trary, I should be ashamed of myself if I excited 
class feeling of any kind. But I do mean to 
suggest this: That the wealth of the country 
has, in recent years, come from particular 
sources; it has come from those sources which 
have built up monopoly. Its point of view is a 
special point of view. '^ It is the point of view of 
those men who do not wish that the people 
should determine their own affairs, because they 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 63 

do not believe that the people's judgment is 
sound. They want to be commissioned to take 
care of the United States and of the people of 
the United States, because they believe that 
they, better than anybody else, understand 
the interests of the United States. I do not 
challenge their character; I challenge their 
point of view. * We cannot afford to be governed 
as we have been governed in the last generation, 
by men who occupy so narrow, so prejudiced, 
so limited a point of view. 
The government of our country cannot be 
lodged in any special class. The policy of a great 
nation cannot be tied up with any particular 
set of interests. I want to say, again and again, 
that my arguments do not touch the character 
of the men to whom I am opposed. I believe 
that the very wealthy men who have got their 
money by certain kinds of corporate enterprise 
have closed in their horizon, and that they do 
not see and do not understand the rank and file 
of the people. It is for that reason that I want 
to break up the little coterie that has deter- 
mined what the government of the nation should 



64 THE NEW FREEDOM 

do. The list of the men who used to determine 
what New Jersey should and should not do did 
not exceed half a dozen, and they were always 
the same men. These very men now are, some 
of them, frank enough to admit that New 
Jersey has finer energy in her because more 
men are consulted and the whole field of action 
is widened and liberalized. We have got to 
relieve our government from the domination 
of special classes, not because these special 
classes are bad, necessarily, but because no 
special class can understand the interests of 
a great community. 

I believe, as I believe in nothing else, in the 
average integrity and the average intelligence 
of the American people, and I do not believe 
that the intelligence of America can be put into 
j commission anywhere. I do not believe that 
j there is any group of men of any kind to whom 
■ we can afford to give that kind of trusteeship. 
. I will not live under trustees if I can help it. 
No group of men less than the majority has a 
right to tell me how I have got to live in Amer- 
ica. I w^ill submit to the majority, because I 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS eSx 

have been trained to do it, — though I may } 
sometimes have my private opinion even of the 
majority. I do not care how wise, how patri- ^ 
otic, the trustees may be, I have never heard 
of any group of men in whose hands I am wiUing 
to lodge the hberties of America in trust. \ 



iFany part of our people want to be wards, 
if they want to have guardians put over them, 
if they want to be taken care of, if they want to 
be children, patronized by the government, 
why, I am sorry, because it will sap the manhood 
of America. But I don't believe they do. I 
believe they want to stand on the firm founda- 
tion of law and right and take care of them- 
selves. I, for my part, don't want to belong to 
a nation, I believe that I do not belong to a 
nation, that needs to be taken care of by guar- 
dians. I want to belong to a nation, and I am 
proud that I do belong to a nation, that knows 
how to take care of itself. If I thought that the 
American people were reckless, were ignorant, 
were vindictive, I might shrink from putting 
the government into their hands. But the 
beauty of democracy is that when you are reck- 



66 THE NEW FREEDOM 

less you destroy your own established conditions 
of life; when you are vindictive, you wreak 
vengeance upon yourself; the whole stability 
of a democratic polity rests upon the fact that 
every interest is every man's interest. 

The theory that the men of biggest affairs, 
whose field of operation is the widest, are the 
proper men to advise the government is, I am 
willing to admit, rather a plausible theory. 
If my business covers the United States not 
only, but covers the world, it is to be presumed 
that I have a pretty wide scope in my vision of 
business. But the flaw is that it is my own 
business that I have a vision of, and not the 
business of the men who lie outside of the scope 
of the plans I have made for a profit out of the 
particular transactions I am connected with. 
And you can't, by putting together a large 
number of men who understand their own busi- 
ness, no matter how large it is, make up a body 
of men who will understand the business of the 
nation as contrasted with their own interest. 

In a former generation, half a century ago, 
there were a great many men associated with 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 67 

the government whose patriotism we are not 
privileged to deny nor to question, who intended 
to serve the people, but had become so satu- 
rated with the point of view of a governing class 
that it was impossible for them to see America 
as the people of America themselves saw it. 
Then there arose that interesting figure, the 
immortal figure of the great Lincoln, who stood 
up declaring that the politicians, the men who 
had governed this country, did not see from the 
point of view of the people. When I think of 
that tall, gaunt figure rising in Illinois, I have a 
picture of a man free, unentangled, unassociated 
with the governing influences of the country, 
ready to see things with an open eye, to see them 
steadily, to see them whole, to see them as the 
men he rubbed shoulders with and associated 
with saw them. What the country needed in 
1860 was a leader who understood and repre- 
sented the thought of the whole people, as 
contrasted with that of a class which imagined 
itself the guardian of the country's welfare. 

Now, likewise, the trouble with our present 
political condition is that we need some man 



68 THE NEW FREEDOM 

who has not been associated with the governing 
classes and the governing influences of this 
country to stand up and speak for us; we need 
to hear a voice from the outside caUing upon the 
American people to assert again their rights 
and prerogatives in the possession of their own 
government. 

/ My thought about both Mr. Taft and Mr. 

I 

Roosevelt is that of entire respect, but these 
gentlemen have been so intimately associated 
with the powers that have been determining the 
policy of this government for almost a genera- 
tion, that they cannot look at the affairs of the 
country with the view of a new age and of a 
changed set of circumstances. They sym- 
pathize with the people; their hearts no doubt 
go out to the great masses of unknown men in 
this country; but their thought is in close, habit- 
ual association with those who have framed the 
policies of the country during all our lifetime. 
Those men have framed the protective tariff, 
have developed the trusts, have co-ordinated 
and ordered all the great economic forces of this 
country in such fashion that nothing but an 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 69 

outside force breaking in can disturb their 
domination and control. It is with this in mind, I 
beheve, that the country can say to these gentle- 
men: "We do not deny your integrity; we do 
not deny your purity of purpose; but the thought 
of the people of the United States has not yet 
penetrated to your consciousness. You are 
willing to act for the people, but you are not 
willing to act through the people. Now we pro- 
pose to act for ourselves." 

I sometimes think that the men who are now 
governing us are unconscious of the chains in 
which thej^ are held. I do not believe that 
men such as we know, among our public men at 
least — most of them — have deliberately put 
us into leading strings to the special interests. 
The special interests have grown up. They 
have grown up by processes which at last, 
happily, we are beginning to understand. And, 
having grown up, having occupied the seats of 
greatest advantage nearest the ear of those who 
are conducting government, having contrib- 
uted the money which was necessary to the 



70 THE NEW FREEDOM 

elections, and therefore having been kindly 
thought of after elections, there has closed 
around the government of the United States a 
very interesting, a very able, a very aggressive 
coterie of gentlemen who are most definite and 
explicit in their ideas as to what they want. 

They don't have to consult us as to what they 
want. They don't have to resort to anybody. 
They know their plans, and therefore they know 
what will be convenient for them. It may be 
that they have really thought what they have 
said they thought; it may be that they know so 
little of the history of economic development 
and of the interests of the United States as to 
believe that their leadership is indispensable for 
our prosperity and development. I don't have 
to prove that they believe that, because they 
themselves admit it. I have heard them admit 
it on many occasions. 

I want to say to you very frankly that I do 
not feel vindictive about it. Some of the men 
who have exercised this control are excellent 
fellows; they really believe that the prosperity 
of the country depends upon them. They 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 71 

really believe that if the leadership of economic 
development in this country dropped from their 
hands, the rest of us are too muddle-headed to 
undertake the task. They not only compre- 
hend the power of the United States within their 
grasp, but they comprehend it within their 
imagination. They are honest men, they have 
just as much right to express their views as I 
have to express mine or you to express yours, but 
it is just about time that we examined their 
views for ourselves and determined their 
validity. 

As a matter of fact, their thought does not 
cover the processes of their own undertakings. 
As a university president, I learned that the 
men who dominate our manufacturing processes 
could not conduct their business for twenty- 
four hours without the assistance of the experts 
with whom the universities were supplying them. 
Modern industry depends upon technical knowl- 
ege; and all that these gentlemen did was to 
manage the external features of great combina- 
tions and their financial operation, which had 
very little to do with the intimate skill with 



72 THE NEW FREEDOM 

which the enterprises were conducted. I know 
men not catalogued in the public prints, men 
not spoken of in public discussion, who are the 
very bone and sinew of the industry of the 
United States. 

Do our masters of industry speak in the 
spirit and interest even of those whom they 
employ? When men ask me what I think about 
the labor question and laboring men, I feel that 
I am being asked what I know about the vast 
majority of the people, and I feel as if I were 
being asked to separate myself, as belonging to a 
particular class, from that great body of my 
fellow-citizens who sustain and conduct the 
enterprises of the country. Until we get away 
from that point of view it will be impossible to 
have a free government. 

I have listened to some very honest and elo- 
quent orators whose sentiments were note- 
worthy for this: that when they spoke of the 
people, they were not thinking of themselves; 
they were thinking of somebody whom they were 
commissioned to take care of. They were 
always planning to do things for the American 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 73 

people, and I have seen them visibly shiver 
when it was suggested that they arrange to have 
something done by the people for themselves. 
They said, "What do they know about it?" I 
always feel like replying, "What do you know 
about it? You know your own interest, but 
who has told you our interests, and what do 
you know about them?" For the business of 
every leader of government is to hear what the 
nation is saying and to know what the nation is 
enduring. It is not his business to judge for 
the nation, but to judge through the nation as its 
spokesman and voice. I do not believe that 
this country could have safely allowed a con- 
tinuation of the policy of the men who have 
viewed affairs in any other light. 

The hypothesis under which we have been 
ruled is that of government through a board of 
trustees, through a selected number of the big 
business men of the country who know a lot 
that the rest of us do not know, and who take it 
for granted that our ignorance would wreck the 
prosperity of the country. The idea of the Presi- 
dents we have recently had has been that they 



74 THE NEW FREEDOM 

were Presidents of a National Board of Trustees. 
That is not my idea. I have been president of 
one board of trustees, and I do not care to have 
another on my hands. I want to be President 
of the people of the United States. There was 
many a time when I was president of the board 
of trustees of a university when the under- 
graduates knew more than the trustees did; and 
it has been in my thought ever since that if I 
could have dealt directly with the people who 
constituted Princeton University I could have 
carried it forward much faster than I could 
dealing with a board of trustees. 

Mark you, I am not saying that these leaders 
knew that they were doing us an evil, or that 
they intended to do us an evil. For my part, 
I am very much more afraid of the man who 
does a bad thing and does not know it is bad 
than of the man who does a bad thing and 
knows it is bad; because I think that in pub- 
lic affairs stupidity is more dangerous than 
knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge. 
If a man does not know enough to know what 
the consequences are going to be to the country, 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 75 

then he cannot govern the country in a way that 
is for its benefit. These gentlemen, whatever 
may have been their intentions, linked the 
government up with the men who control the 
finances. They may have done it innocently, 
or they may have done it corruptly, without 
affecting my argument at all. And they them- 
selves cannot escape from that alliance. 

Here, for example, is the old question of cam- 
paign funds: If I take a hundred thousand dol- 
lars from a group of men representing a particular 
interest that has a big stake in a certain schedule 
of the tariff, I take it with the knowledge that 
those gentlemen will expect me not to forget their 
interest in that schedule, and that they will take 
it as a point of implicit honor that I should see to 
it that they are not damaged by too great a 
change in that schedule. Therefore, if I take 
their money, I am bound to them by a tacit 
imphcation of honor. Perhaps there is no 
ground for objection to this situation so long 
as the function of government is conceived to 
be to look after the trustees of prosperity, who 
in turn will look after the people; but on any 



76 THE NEW FREEDOM 

other theory than that of trusteeship no in- 
terested campaign contributions can be toler- 
ated for a moment, — save those of the milhons 
of citizens who thus support the doctrines they 
beheve and the men whom they recognized as 
their spokesmen. 

I tell you the men I am interested in are the 
men who, under the conditions we 'have had, 
never had their voices heard, who never got a 

I line in the newspapers,"*'who never got a moment 
on the platform, who never had access to the 
ears of Governors or Presidents or of anybody 
who was responsible for the conduct of public 

I affairs, but who went silently and patiently to 
their work every day carrying the burden of the 

j world. How are they to be understood by the 

) masters of finance, if only the masters of finance 
are consulted .^^ 

That is what I mean when I say, "Bring the 
government back to the people." I do not 
mean anything demagogic; I do not mean to 
talk as if we wanted a great mass of men to rush 
in and destroy something. That is not the 



FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS 77 

idea. I want the people to come in and take 
possession of their own premises; for I hold that 
the government belongs to the people, and that 
they have a right to that intimate access to it 
which will determine every turn of its policy. 

America is never going to submit to guar- 
dianship. America is never going to choose 
thralldom instead of freedom. Look what 
there is to decide! There is the tariff question. 
Can the tariff question be decided in favor of 
the people, so long as the monopolies are the 
chief counselors at Washington .^^ There is the 
currency question. Are we going to settle the 
currency question so long as the government 
listens only to the counsel of those who command 
the banking situation .^^ 

Then there is the question of conservation. 
What is our fear about conservation .f* The hands 
that are being stretched out to monopolize our 
forests, to prevent or pre-empt the use of our 
great power-producing streams the hands that 
are being stretched into the bowels of the earth 
to take possession of the great riches that lie 
hidden in Alaska and elsewhere in the incom- 



78 THE NEW FREEDOM 

parable domain of the United States, are the 
hands of monopoly. Are these men to continue 
to stand at the elbow of government and tell us 
how we are to save ourselves, — from them- 
selves? You can not settle the question of 
conservation while monopoly is close to the ears 
of those who govern. And the question of con- 
servation is a great deal bigger than the ques- 
tion of saving our forests and our mineral re- 
sources and our waters; it is as big as the life 
and happiness and strength and elasticity and 
hope of our people. 

There are tasks awaiting the government of 
the United States which it cannot perform until 
every pulse of that government beats in unison 
with the needs and the desires of the whole body 
of the American people. Shall we not give the 
people access of sympathy, access of authority, 
to the instrumentalities which are to be indis- 
pensable to their lives? 



IV 

LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL 

WHEN I look back on the processes of 
history, when I survey the genesis of 
America, I see this written over every 
page: that the nations are renewed from the 
bottom, not from the top; that the genius 
which springs up from the ranks of unknown 
men is the genius which renews the youth and 
energy of the people. Everything I know about 
history, every bit of experience and observation 
that has contributed to my thought, has con- 
firmed me in the conviction that the real wisdom 
of human life is compounded out of the experi- 
ences of ordinary men. The utility, the vitality, 
the fruitage of life does not come from the top 
to the bottom; it comes, like the natural growth 
of a great tree, from the soil, up through the 
trunk into the branches to the foliage and the 
fruit. The great struggling unknown masses 

79 



80 THE NEW FREEDOM 

of the men who are at the base of everything 
are the dynamic force that is hfting the levels 
of society. A nation is as great, and only as 
great, as her rank and file. 

— \ So' the first and chief need of this nation of 
ours to-day is to include in the partnership of 
government all those great bodies of unnamed 
men who are going to produce our future leaders 
and renew the future energies of America. And 
as I confess that, as I confess my belief in the 
common man, I know what I am saying. The 
man who is swimming against the stream knows 
the strength of it. The man who is in the melee 
knows what blows are being struck and what 
blood is being drawn. The man who is on the 
make is the judge of what is happening in 
America, not the man who has made good; not 
the man who has emerged from the flood ; not the 
man who is standing on the bank looking on, 
but the man who is struggling for his life and for 
the lives of those who are dearer to him than him- 
self. That is the man whose judgment will tell 
you what is going on in America; that is the man 
by whose judgment I, for one, wish to be guided. 



LIFE COMES FROM THE SOiE bi 

We have had the wrong jury; we have had 
the wrong group, — no, I will not say the wrong 
group, but too small a group, — in control of 
the policies of the United States. The average 
man has not been consulted, and his heart had 
begun to sink for fear he never would be con- 
sulted again. Therefore, we have got to or- 
ganize a government whose sympathies will be 
open to the whole body of the people of the 
United States, a government which will consult 
as large a proportion of the people of the United 
States as possible before it acts. Because the 
great problem of government is to know what 
the average man is experiencing and is thinking 
about. Most of us are average men; very few 
of us rise, except by fortunate accident, above 
the general level of the community about us; 
and therefore the man who thinks common 
thoughts, the man who has had common experi- 
ences, is almost always the man who interprets 
America aright. Isn't that the reason that 
we are proud of such stories as the story of 
Abraham Lincoln, — a man who rose out of the 
ranks and interpreted America better than any 



82 THE NEW FREEDOM 

man had interpreted it who had risen out of 
the privileged classes or the educated classes of 
America? 

The hope of the United States in the present 
and in the future is the same that it has always 
been: it is the hope and confidence that out of 
unknown homes will come men who will con- 
stitute themselves the masters of industry and 
of politics. The average hopefulness, the aver- 
age welfare, the average enterprise, the average 
initiative, of the United States are the only things 
that make it rich. We are not rich because a 
few gentlemen direct our industry; we are rich 
because of our own intelligence and our own 
industry. America does not consist of men who 
get their names into the newspapers; America 
does not consist politically of the men who set 
themselves up to be political leaders; she does 
not consist of the men who do most of her 
talking, — they are important only so far as 
they speak for that great voiceless multitude 
of men who constitute the great body and the 
saving force of the nation. Nobody who cannot 
speak the common thought, who does not move 



LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL 83 

by the common impulse, is the man to speak 
for America, or for any of her future purposes. 
Only he is fit to speak who knows the thoughts 
of the great body of citizens, the men who go 
about their business every day, the men who 
toil from morning till night, the men who go 
home tired in the evenings, the men who are 
carrying on the things we are so proud of. ' 

You know how it thrills our blood sometimes 
to think how all the nations of the earth wait 
to see what America is going to do with her 
power, her physical power, her enormous re- 
sources, her enormous wealth. The nations 
hold their breath to see what this young country 
will do with her young unspoiled strength; we 
cannot help but be proud that we are strong. 
But what has made us strong .^^ The toil of 
millions of men, the toil of men who do not 
boast, who are inconspicuous, but who live their 
lives humbly from day to day; it is the great 
body of toilers that constitutes the might of 
America. It is one of the glories of our land 
that nobody is able to predict from what family, 
from what region, from what race, even, the 



84 THE NEW FREEDOM 

leaders of the country are going to come. 
The great leaders of this country have not come 
very often from the established, "successful" 
families. 

I remember speaking at a school not long ago 
where I understood that almost all the young 
men were the sons of very rich people, and I 
told them I looked upon them with a great 
deal of pity, because, I said: "Most of you 
fellows are doomed to obscurity. You will not 
do anything. You will never try to do any- 
thing, and with all the great tasks of the country 
waiting to be done, probably you are the very 
men who will decline to do them. Some man 
who has been 'up against it,' some man who 
has come out of the crowd, somebody who has 
Jiad the whip of necessity laid on his back, will 
emerge out of the crowd, will show that he 
understands the crowd, understands the inter- 
ests of the nation, united and not separated, 
and will stand up and lead us." 

If I may speak of my own experience, I have 
found audiences made up of the "common 
people" quicker to take a point, quicker to 



LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL 85 

understand an argument, quicker to discern 
a tendency and to comprehend a principle, than 
many a college class that I have lectured to,— 
not because the college class lacked the intelli- 
gence, but because college boys are not in con- 
tact with the realities of life, while "common" 
citizens are in contact with the actual life 
of day by day; you do not have to explain to 
them what touches them to the quick. 

There is one illustration of the value of the 
constant renewal of society from the bottom 
that has always interested me profoundly. The 
only reason why government did not suffer 
dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristo- 
cratic system which then prevailed was that so 
many of the men who were efficient instruments 
of government were drawn from the church, — 
from that great religious body which was then 
the only church, that body which we now dis- 
tinguish from other religious bodies as the 
Roman Cathohc Church. The Roman Catholic 
Church was then, as it is now, a great democracy. 
There was no peasant so humble that he might 
not become a priest, and no priest so obscure 



86 THE NEW FREEDOM 

that he might not become Pope of Christendom; 
and every chancellery in Europe, every court 
in Europe, was ruled by these learned, trained 
and accomplished men, — the priesthood of that 
great and dominant body. What kept govern- 
ment alive in the Middle Ages was this constant 
rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank 
and file of the great body of the people through 
the open channels of the priesthood. That, it 
seems to me, is one of the most interesting and 
convincing illustrations that could possibly be 
adduced of the thing that I am talking about. 

The only way that government is kept pure 
is by keeping these channels open, so that nobody 
may deem himself so humble as not to consti- 
tute a part of the body politic, so that there 
will constantly be coming new blood into the 
veins of the body politic; so that no man is 
so obscure that he may not break the crust 
of any class he may belong to, may not spring 
up to higher levels and be counted among the 
leaders of the state. Anything that depresses, 
anything that makes the organization greater 
than the man, anything that blocks, discourages, 



LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL 87 

dismays the bumble man, is against all tbe 
principles of progress. Wben I see alliances 
formed, as tbey are now being formed, by 
successful men of business with successful 
organizers of politics, I know that something 
has been done that checks the vitality and prog- 
ress of society. Such an alliance, made at the 
top, is an alliance made to depress the levels, 
to hold them where they are, if not to sink 
them; and, therefore, it is the constant business 
of good politics to break up such partnerships, 
to re-establish and reopen the connections 
between the great body of the people and the 
offices of government. 

To-day, when our government has so far 
passed into the hands of special interests; 
to-day, when the doctrine is implicitly avowed 
that only select classes have the equipment 
necessary for carrying on government; to-day, 
when so many conscientious citizens, smitten 
with the scene of social wrong and suffering, 
have fallen victims to the fallacy that benevolent 
government can be meted out to the people 
by kind-hearted trustees of prosperity and 



88 THE NEW FREEDOM 

guardians of the welfare of dutiful employees, — 
to-day, supremely, does it behoove this nation 
to remember that a people shall be saved by 
the power that sleeps in its own deep bosom, or 
by none; shall be renewed in hope, in conscience, 
in strength, by waters welling up from its 
own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; 
not by patronage of its aristocrats. The flower 
does not bear the root, but the root the flower. 
Everything that blooms in beauty in the air of 
heaven draws its fairness, its vigor, from its 
roots. Nothing living can blossom into fruitage 
unless through nourishing stalks deep-planted 
in the common soil. The rose is merely the 
evidence of the vitality of the root; and the real 
source of its beauty, the very blush that it wears 
upon its tender cheek, comes from those silent 
sources of life that lie hidden in the chemistry of 
the soil. Up from that soil, up from the silent 
bosom of the earth, rise the currents of life and 
energy. Up from the common soil, up from 
the quiet heart of the people, rise joyously to- 
day streams of hope and determination bound 
to renew the face of the earth in glory. 



LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL 89 

I tell you, the so-called radicalism of our 
times is simply the effort of nature to release 
the generous energies of our people. This great 
American people is at bottom just, virtuous, and 
hopeful; the roots of its being are in the soil 
of what is lovely, pure, and of good report, and 
the need of the hour is just that radicalism that 
will clear a way for the realization of the aspi- 
rations of a sturdy race. 



THE PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 

FOR a long time this country of ours has 
lacked one of the institutions which 
freemen have always and everywhere 
held fundamental. For a long time there has 
been no sufficient opportunity of counsel among 
the people; no place and method of talk, of 
exchange of opinion, of parley. Communities 
have outgrown the folk-moot and the town- 
meeting. Congress, in accordance with the 
genius of the land, which asks for action and is 
impatient of words, — Congress has become an 
institution which does its work in the privacy 
of committee rooms and not on the floor of the 
Chamber; a body that makes laws, — a legis- 
lature; not a body that debates, — not a parlia- 
ment.' 'Party conventions afford Uttle or no op- 
portunity for discussion; platforms are privately 
manufactured and adopted with a whoop. It 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 91 

is partly because citizens have foregone the 
taking of counsel together that the unholy 
alliances of bosses and Big Business have been 
able to assume to govern for us. 
■ ^ I conceive it to be one of the needs of the hour 
to restore the processes of common counsel, and 
to substitute them for the processes of private 
arrangement which now determine the policies 
of cities, states, and nation. We must learn, we 
freemen, to meet, as our fathers did, somehow, 
somewhere, for consultation. There must be 
discussion and debate, in which all freely 
participate. 1 1 

It must be candid debate, and it must have 
for its honest purpose the clearing up of ques- 
tions and the establishing of the truth. Too 
much political discussion is not to honest pur- 
pose, but only for the confounding of an op- 
ponent. **I am often reminded, when political 
debate gets warm and we begin to hope that 
the truth is making inroads on the reason of 
those who have denied it, of the way a debate 
in Virginia once seemed likely to end: 

When I was a young man studying at Char- 



92 THE NEW FREEDOM 

lottesville, there were two factions in the Demo- 
cratic party in the State of Virginia which were 
having a pretty hot contest with each other. 
In one of the counties one of these factions had 
practically no following at all. A man named 
Massey, one of its redoubtable debaters, though 
a little, slim, insignificant-looking person, sent 
a messenger up into this county and challenged 
the opposition to debate with him. They 
didn't quite like the idea, but they were too 
proud to decline, so they put up their best de- 
bater, a big, good-natured man whom every- 
body was familiar with as "Tom," and it was 
arranged that Massey should have the first 
hour and that Tom Whatever-his-name-was 
should succeed him the next hour. When the 
occasion came, Massey, with his characteristic 
shrewdness, began to get underneath the skins 
of the audience, and he hadn't made more 
than half his speech before it was evident that 
he was getting that hostile crowd with him; 
whereupon one of Tom's partisans in the back of 
the room, seeing how things were going, cried 
out: "Tom, call him a liar and make it a fight!'* 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 93 

Now, that kind of debate, that spirit in dis- 
cussion, gets us nowhere. Our national affairs 
are too serious, they lie too close to the well- 
being of each one of us, to excuse our talking 
about them except in earnestness and candor 
and a willingness to speak and listen with open 
minds. It is a misfortune that attends the 
party system that in the heat of a campaign 
partisan passions are so aroused that we cannot 
have frank discussion. Yet I am sure that I 
observe, and that all citizens must observe, an 
almost startling change in the temper of the 
people in this respect. The campaign just closed 
was markedly different from others that had pre- 
ceded it in the degree to which party con- 
siderations were forgotten in the seriousness 
of the things we had to discuss as common 
citizens of an endangered country. 

There is astir in the air of America something 
that I for one never saw before, never felt be- 
fore. I have been going to political meetings 
all my life, though not all my life playing an 
immodestly conspicuous part in them; and 
there is a spirit in our political meetings now 



94 THE NEW FREEDOM 

that I never saw before. It hasn't been very 
many years, let me say for example, that 
women attended political meetings. And 
women are attending political meetings now 
not simply because there is a woman question in 
politics; they are attending them because the 
modern political meeting is not like the political 
meeting of five or ten years ago. That was a 
mere ratification rally. That was a mere 
occasion for "whooping it up" for somebody. 
That was merely an occasion upon which one 
party was denounced unreasonably and the 
other was lauded unreasonably. No party 
has ever deserved quite the abuse that each 
party has got in turn, and nobody has ever 
deserved the praise that both parties have got 
in turn. The old political meeting was a 
wholly irrational performance; it was got to- 
gether for the purpose of saying things that 
were chiefly not so and that were known by 
those who heard them not to be so, and were 
simply to be taken as a tonic in order to produce 
cheers. 

But I am very much mistaken in the temper 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 95 

of my fellow-countrymen if the meetings I 
have seen in the last two years bear any re- 
semblance to those older meetings. Men now 
get together in a political meeting in order to 
hear things of the deepest consequence dis- 
cussed. And you will find almost as many 
Republicans in a Democratic meeting as you 
will find Democrats in a RepubUcan meeting; 
the spirit of frank discussion, of common 
counsel, is abroad 

Good will it be for the country if the interest 
in public concerns manifested so widely and so 
sincerely be not suffered to expire with the 
election! Why should political debate go on 
only when somebody is to be elected.^ Why 
should it be confined to campaign time.^^ 

There is a movement on foot in which, in 
common with many men and women who love 
their country, I am greatly interested, — the 
movement to open the schoolhouse to the 
grown-up people in order that they may gather 
and talk over the affairs of the neighborhood 
and the state. There are schoolhouses all over 



96 THE NEW FREEDOM 

the land which are not used by the teachers and 
children in the summer months, which are not 
used in the winter time in the evening for school 
purposes. These buildings belong to the public. 
Why not insist everywhere that they be -used as 
places of discussion, such as of old took place in 
the town-meetings to which everybody went and 
where every public officer was freely called to 
account.? The schoolhouse, which belongs to 
all of us, is a natural place in which to gather 
to consult over our common affairs. 

I was very much interested in the remark of 
a fellow-citizen of ours who had been born on 
the other side of the water. He said that not 
long ago he wandered into one of those neigh- 
borhood schoolhouse meetings, and there found 
himself among people who were discussing 
matters in which they were all interested; and 
when he came out he said to me: '*I have been 
living in America now ten years, and to-night 
for the first time I saw America as I had 
imagined it to be. This gathering together of 
men of all sorts upon a perfect footing of equality 
to discuss franklv with one another what con- 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 97 

cerned them all, — that is what I dreamed 
America was." 

That set me to thinking. He hadn't seen 
the America he had come to find until that 
night. Had he not felt like a neighbor .^^ Had 
men not consulted him.^^ He had felt like an 
outsider. Had there been no little circles in 
which public affairs were discussed? 

You know that the great melting-pot of 
America, the place where we are all made 
Americans of, is the public school, where men 
of every race and of every origin and of every 
station in life send their children, or ought to 
send their children, and where, being mixed 
together, the youngsters are all infused with the 
American spirit and developed into Ameri- 
can men and American women. When, in 
addition to sending our children to school to 
paid teachers, we go to school to one another 
in those same schoolhouses, then we shall be- 
gin more fully to realize than we ever have 
realized before what American life is. And let 
me tell you this, confidentially, that wherever 
you find school boards that object to opening the 



9.8 THE NEW FREEDOM 

schoolhouses in the evening for public meetings 
of every proper sort, you had better look 
around for some politician who is objecting 
to it; because the thing that cures bad politics 
is talk by the neighbors. The thing that 
brings to light the concealed circumstances of 
our political life is the talk of the neighborhood ; 
and if you can get the neighbors together, 
get them frankly to tell everything they know, 
then your politics, your ward politics, and your 
city politics, and your state politics, too, will 
be turned inside out, — in the way they ought 
to be. Because the chief difficulty our politics 
has suffered is that the inside didn't look like 
the outside. Nothing clears the air hke frank 
discussion. 

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due 
to the fact that at a comparatively early age 
in my experience as a public speaker I had the 
privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New 
York. The audience in Cooper Union is made 
up of every kind of man and woman, from the 
poor devil who simply comes in to keep warm 
up to the man who has come in to take a serious 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 99 

part in the discussion of the evening. I want 
to tell you this, that in the questions that are 
asked there after the speech is over, the most 
penetrating questions that I have ever had ad- 
dressed to me came from some of the men who 
were the least well-dressed in the audience, came 
from the plain fellows, came from the fellows 
whose muscle was daily up against the whole 
struggle of life. They asked questions which 
went to the heart of the business and put me 
to my mettle to answer them. I felt as if those 
questions came as a voice out of life itself, not 
a voice out of any school less severe than the 
severe school of experience. And what I like 
about this social centre idea of the schoolhouse 
is that there is the place where the ordinary 
fellow is going to get his innings, going to ask 
his questions, going to express his opinions, 
going to convince those who do not realize the 
vigor of America that the vigor of America 
pulses in the blood of every true American, and 
that the only place he can find the true American 
is in this clearing-house of absolutely demo- 
cratic opinion. 



100 THE NEW FREEDOM 

No one man understands the United States. 
I have met some gentlemen who professed 
they did. I have even met some business men 
who professed they held in their own single 
comprehension the business of the United 
States; but I am educated enough to know 
that they do not. Education has this useful 
effect, that it narrows of necessity the circles 
of one's egotism. No student knows his sub- 
ject. The most he knows is where and how to 
find out the things he does not know with re- 
gard to it. That is also the position of a states- 
man. No statesman understands the whole 
country. He should make it his business to 
find out where he will get the information 
necessary to understand at least a part of it 
at a time when dealing with complex affairs. 
What we need is a universal revival of com- 
mon counsel. 

I have sometimes reflected on the lack of a 
body of public opinion in our cities, and once 
I contrasted the habits of the city man with 
those of the countryman in a way which got 
me into trouble. I described what a man in a ^ 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 101 

city generally did when he got into a public 
vehicle or sat in a public place. He doesn't 
talk to anybody, but he plunges his head into 
a newspaper and presently experiences a re- 
action which he calls his opinion, but which is 
not an opinion at all, being merely the im- 
pression that a piece of news or an editorial 
has made upon him. He cannot be said to be 
participating in public opinion at all until he 
has laid his mind alongside the minds of his 
neighbors and discussed with them the incidents / 
of the day and the tendencies of the time. 

Where I got into trouble was, that I ven- 
tured on a comparison. I said that public 
opinion was not typified on the streets of a 
busy city, but was typified around the stove in 
a country store where men sat and probably 
chewed tobacco and spat into a sawdust box, 
and made up, before they got through, what 
was the neighborhood opinion both about 
persons and events; and then, inadvertently, 
I added this philosophical reflection, that, 
whatever might be said against the chewing of 
tobacco, this at least could be said for it: that 



102 THE NEW FREEDOM 

it gave a man time to think between sentences. 
Ever since then I have been represented, par- 
ticularly in the advertisements of tobacco 
firms, as in favor of the use of chewing tobacco ! 

The reason that some city men are not more 
catholic in their ideas is that they do not share 
the opinion of the country, and the reason that 
some countrymen are rustic is that they do not 
know the opinion of the city; they are both 
hampered by their limitations. I heard the other 
day of a woman who had lived all her life in a 
city and in an hotel. She made a first visit to the 
country last summer, and spent a week in a 
farmhouse. Asked afterward what had inter- 
ested her most about her experience, she replied 
that it was hearing the farmer "page his cows!" 

A very urban point of view with regard to 
a common rustic occurrence, and yet that lan- 
guage showed the sharp, the inelastic limits of 
her thought. She was provincial in the ex- 
treme; she thought even more narrowly than 
in the terms of a city; she thought in the terms 
of an hotel. In proportion as we are confined 
within the walls of one hostelry or one city or 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 103 

one state, we are provincial. We can do noth- 
ing more to advance our country's welfare 
than to bring the various communities within 
the counsels of the nation. The real difficulty 
of our nation has been that not enough of us 
realized that the matters we discussed were 
matters of common concern. We have talked 
as if we had to serve now this part of the country 
and again that part, now this interest and again 
that interest; as if all interests were not linked 
together, provided we understood them and 
knew how they were related to one another. 

If you would know what makes the great 
river as it nears the sea, you must travel up the 
stream. You must go up into the hills and 
back into the forests and see the little rivulets, 
the little streams, all gathering in hidden 
places to swell the great body of water in the 
channel. And so with the making of public 
opinion: Back in the country, on the farms, 
in the shops, in the hamlets, in the homes of 
cities, in the schoo, houses, where men get to- 
gether and are frank and true with one another, 
there come trickling down the streams which 



104 THE NEW FREEDOM 

are to make the mighty force of the river, the 
river which is to drive all the enterprises of 
human life as it sweeps on into the great com- 
mon sea of humanity. 

— I feel nothing so much as the intensity of the 
common man. I can pick out in any audience 
the men who are at ease in their fortunes: 
they are seeing a public man go through his 
stunts. But there are in every crowd other 
men who are not doing that, — men who are 
listening as if they were waiting to hear if 
there were somebody who could speak the 
thing that is stirring in their own hearts and 
minds. It makes a man's heart ache to think 
that he cannot be sure that he is doing it for 
them; to wonder whether they are longing 
for something that he does not understand. 
He prays God that something will bring into 
his consciousness what is in theirs, so that 
the whole nation may feel at last released from 
its dumbness, feel at last that there is no in- 
visible force holding it back from its goal, feel 
at last that there is hope and confidence and 
that the road may be trodden as if we were 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 105 

brothers, shoulder to shoulder, not asking each 
other anything about differences of class, not 
contesting for any selfish advance, but united 
in the common enterprise. 

The burden that is upon the heart of every 
conscientious public man is the burden of the 
thought that perhaps he does not sufficiently 
comprehend the national life. For, as a matter 
of fact, no single man does comprehend it. 
The whole purpose of democracy is that we 
may hold counsel with one another, so as not 
to depend upon the understanding of one man, 
but to depend upon the counsel of all. For 
only as men are brought into counsel, and state 
their own needs and interests, can the general 
interests of a great people be compounded into 
a policy that will be suitable to all. 

I have realized all my life, as a man connected 
with the tasks of education, that the chief use 
of education is to open the understanding to 
comprehend as many things as possible. That 
it is not what a man knows, — for no man 
knows a great deal, — but what a man has 
upon his mind to find out; it is his ability to 



106 THE NEW FREEDOM 

understand things, it is his connection with the 
great masses of men that makes him fit to speak 
for others, — and only that. I have associated 
with some of the gentlemen who are connected 
with the special interests of this country (and 
many of them are pretty fine men, I can tell 
you), but, fortunately for me, I have associated 
with a good many other persons besides; I 
have not confined my acquaintance to these 
interesting groups, and I can actually tell those 
gentlemen some things that they have not had 
time to find out. It has been my great good 
fortune not to have had my head buried in 
special undertakings, and, therefore, I have had 
an occasional look at the horizon. Moreover, I 
found out, a long time ago, fortunately for me, 
when I was a boy, that the United States did 
not consist of that part of it in which I lived. 
There was a time when I was a very narrow 
provincial, but happily the circumstances of 
my life made it necessary that I should go to a 
very distant part of the country, and I early 
found out what a very limited acquaintance 
I had with the United States, found out that 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 107 

the only thing that would give me any sense 
at all in discussing the affairs of the United 
States was to know as many parts of the United 
States as possible. 

The men who have been ruling America must 
consent to let the majority into the game. We 
will no longer permit any system to go uncor- 
rected which is based upon private understand- 
ings and expert testimony; we will not allow 
the few to continue to determine what the 
policy of the country is to be. It is a question 
of access to our own government. There are 
very few of us who have had any real access 
to the government. It ought to be a matter 
of common counsel; a matter of united coun- 
sel; a matter of mutual comprehension. 

So, keep the air clear with constant discussion. 
Make every public servant feel that he is acting 
in the open and under scrutiny; and, above all 
things else, take these great fundamental ques- 
tions of your hves with which political plat- 
forms concern themselves and search them 
through and through by every process of debate. 



108 THE NEW FREEDOM 

Then we shall have a clear air in which we shall 
see our way to each kind of social betterment. 
When we have freed our government, when we 
have restored freedom of enterprise, when we 
have broken up the partnerships between money 
and power which now block us at every turn, 
then we shall see our way to accomplish all the 
handsome tilings which platforms promise in 
vain if they do not start at the point where 
stand the gates of liberty. 

I am not afraid of the American people get- 
ting up and doing something. I am only 
afraid they will not; and when I hear a popular 
vote spoken of as mob government, I feel like 
telling the man who dares so to speak that he 
has no right to call himself an American. You 
cannot make a reckless, passionate force out 
of a body of sober people earning their living 
in a free country. Just picture to yourselves 
the voting population of this great land, from 
the sea to the far borders in the mountains, 
going calmly, man by man, to the polls, ex- 
pressing its judgment about public affairs: is 
that your image of "a mob?" 



PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE 109 

What is a mob? A mob is a body of men in 
hot contact with one another, moved by un- 
governable passion to do a hasty thing that 
they will regret the next day. Do you see any- 
thing resembling a mob in that voting popula- 
tion of the countryside, men tramping over the 
mountains, men going to the general store up 
in the village, men moving in little talking- 
groups to the corner grocery to cast their 
ballots, — is that your notion of a mob ? Or 
is that your picture of a free, self-governing 
people? I am not afraid of the judgments so 
expressed, if you give men time to think, if 
you give them a clear conception of the things 
they are to vote for; because the deepest con- 
viction and passion of my heart is that the 
common people, by which I mean all of us, are 
to be absolutely trusted. 

So, at this opening of a new age, in this its 
day of unrest and discontent, it is our part to 
clear the air, to bring about common counsel; 
to set up the parliament of the people; to 
demonstrate that we are fighting no man, that 
we are trying to bring all men to understand 



110 THE NEW FREEDOM 

one another; that we are not the friends of 
any class against any other class, but that our 
duty is to make classes understand one another. 
Our part is to lift so high the incomparable 
standards of the common interest and the com- 
mon justice that all men with vision, all men 
with hope, all men with the convictions of 
America in their hearts, will crowd to that 
standard and a new day of achievement may 
come for the liberty which we love. — 



VI 

LET THERE BE LIGHT 

THE concern of patriotic men is to put 
our government again on its right basis, 
by substituting the popular will for the 
rule of guardians, the processes of common 
counsel for those of private arrangement. In 
order to do this, a first necessity is to open 
the doors and let in the light on all affairs 
which the people have a right to know about. 
In the first place, it is necessary to open up 
all the processes of our pohtics. They have 
been too secret, too complicated, too round- 
about; they have consisted too much of private 
conferences and secret understandings, of the 
control of legislation by men who were not 
legislators, but who stood outside and dictated, 
controlling oftentimes by very questionable 
means, which they would not have dreamed of 

allowing to become public. The whole process 

111 



f 



112 THE NEW FREEDOM 

must be altered. We must take the selection of 
candidates for office, for example, out of the 
hands of small groups of men, of little coteries, 
out of the hands of machines working behind 
closed doors, and put it into the hands of the 
people themselves again by means of direct 
primaries and elections to which candidates of 
every sort and degree may have free access. 
We must substitute public for private machinery. 
It is necessary, in the second place, to give 
society command of its own economic life again 
by denying to those who conduct the great 
modern operations of business the privacy that 
used to belong properly enough to men who 
used only their own capital and their individual 
energy in business. The processes of capital 
must be as open as the processes of politics. 
Those who make use of the great modern accu- 
mulations of wealth, gathered together by the 
dragnet process of the sale of stocks and 
bonds, and piling up of reserves, must be 
treated as under a public obligation; they 
must be made responsible for their business 
methods to the great communities which are 



LET THERE BE LIGHT ILS 

in fact their working partners, so that the 
hand which makes correction shall easily reach 
them and a new principle of responsibility be 
felt throughout their structure and operation. ^ 

What are the right methods of politics? 
Why, the right methods are those of public 
discussion : the methods of leadership open and 
above board, not closeted with "boards of 
guardians" or anybody else, but brought out 
under the sky, where honest eyes can look upon 
them and honest eyes can judge of them. '^ 

If there is nothing to conceal, then why con- 
ceal it.f^ If it is a public game, why play it in 
private.'^ If it is a public game, then why not 
come out into the open and play it in public.'^ 
You have got to cure diseased politics as wel 
nowadays cure tuberculosis, by making all the 
people who suffer from it live out of doors; 
not onl}^ spend their days out of doors and walk 
around, but sleep out of doors; always remain 
in the open, where they will be accessible to 
fresh, nourishing, and revivifying influences. ^ 

I, for one, have the conviction that government 
ought to be all outside and no inside. I, for 



114 THE NEW FREEDOM 

my part, believe that there ought to be no place 
where anything can be done that everybody does 
not know about. ^ It would be very inconvenient 
for some gentlemen, probably, if government 
were all outside, but we have consulted their sus- 
ceptibilities too long already. It is barely pos- 
sible that some of these gentlemen are unjustly 
suspected ; in that case they owe it to themselves 
to come out and operate in the light. The very 
fact that so much in politics is done in the dark, 
^behind closed doors, promotes suspicion. Every- 
body knows that corruption thrives in secret 
places, and avoids public places, and we believe 
it a fair presumption that secrecy means impro- 
priety. So, our honest politicians and our hon- 
orable corporation heads owe it to their reputa- 
tions to bring their activities out into the open. 
At any rate, whether they like it or not, these 
affairs are going to be dragged into the open. 
We are more anxious about their reputations 
than they are themselves. We are too solicitous 
for their morals, — if they are not,^ — to permit 
them longer to continue subject to the tempta- 
tions of secrecy. You know there is temptation 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 115 

in loneliness and secrecy. Haven't you experi- 
enced it? I have. We are never so proper in 
our conduct as when everybody can look and 
see exactly what we are doing. If you are off 
in some distant part of the world and suppose 
that nobody who lives within a mile of your 
home is anywhere around, there are times when 
you adjourn your ordinary standards. You say 
to yourself: "Well, I'll have a fling this time; 
nobody will know anything about it." If you 
were on the desert of Sahara, you would feel 
that you might permit yourself, — well, say, 
some slight latitude in conduct; but if you saw 
one of your immediate neighbors coming the 
other way on a camel, — you would behave 
yourself until he got out of sight. The most 
dangerous thing in the world is to get off where 
nobody knows you. I advise you to stay 
around among the neighbors, and then you 
may keep out of jail. That is the only way 
some of us can keep out of jail. 

Publicity is one of the purifying elements of 
politics. The best thing that you can do with 
anything that is crooked is to lift it up where 



116 THE NEW FREEDOM 

people can see that it is crooked, and then it 
will either straighten itself out or disappear. 
Nothing checks all the bad practices of politics 
like public exposure. You can't be crooked in 
the light. I don't know whether it has ever 
been tried or not; but I venture to say, purely 
from observation, that it can't be done. 

And so the people of the United States have 
made up their minds to do a healthy thing for 
both politics and big business. Permit me to 
mix a few metaphors: They are going to open 
doors; they are going to let up blinds; they are 
going to drag sick things into the open air and 
into the light of the sun. They are going to 
organize a great hunt, and smoke certain animals 
out of their burrows. They are going to unearth 
the beast in the jungle in which when they 
hunted they were caught by the beast instead 
of catching him. They have determined, there- 
fore, to take an axe and raze the jungle, and 
then see where the beast will find cover. And 
I, for my part, bid them God-speed. The 
jungle breeds nothing but infection and shelters 
nothing but the enemies of mankind. 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 117 

And nobody is going to get caught in our 
hunt except the beasts that prey. Nothing is 
going to be cut down or injured that anybody 
ought to wish preserved. 

ojYou know the story of the Irishman who, 
while digging a hole, was asked, "Pat, what are 
you doing, — digging a hole?" And he replied, 
"No, sir; I am digging the dirt, and laving 
the hole." It was probably the same Irishman 
who, seen digging around the wall of a house, 
was asked, "Pat, what are you doing?" And 
he answered, " Faith, I am letting the dark out of 
the cellar." Now, that's exactly what/^e want 
to do, — let the dark out of the cellar] 

Take, first, the relations existing between 
politics and business. 

It is perfectly legitimate, of course, that the 
business interests of the country should not 
only enjoy the protection of the law, but that 
they should be in every way furthered and 
strengthened and facilitated by legislation. The 
country has no jealousy of any connection 
between business and politics which is a legiti- 




118 THE NEW FREEDOM 

mate connection. It is not in the least averse 
from open efforts to accommodate law to the 
material development which has so strengthened 
the country in all that it has undertaken by 
supplying its extraordinary life with its nec- 
essary physical foundations. 

But the illegitimate connections between busi- 
ness and legislation are another matter. I 
would wish to speak on this subject with sober- 
ness and circumspection. I have no desire to 
excite anger against anybody. That would be 
easy, but it would do no particular good. I 
wish, rather, to consider an unhappy situation 
in a spirit that may enable us to account for it, 
to some extent, and so perhaps get at the causes 
and the remedy. Mere denunciation doesn't 
help much to clear up a matter so involved as 
is the complicity of business with evil politics 
in America. 

Every community is vaguely aware that the 
political machine upon which it looks askance 
has certain very definite connections with men 
who are engaged in business on a large scale, 
and the suspicion which attaches to the machine 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 119 

itself has begun to attach also to business enter- 
prises, just because these connections are known 
to exist. If these connections were open and 
avowed, if everybody knew just what they 
involved and just what use was being made 
of them, there would be no difficulty in keeping 
an eye upon affairs and in controlling them by 
public opinion. But, unfortunately, the whole 
process of law-making in America is a very 
obscure one. There is no highway of legislation, 
but there are many by-wa,ys. Parties are not 
organized in such a way in our legislatures as 
to make any one group of men avowedly respon- 
sible for the course of legislation. The whole 
process of discussion, if any discussion at all 
takes place, is private and shut away from 
public scrutiny and knowledge. There are so 
many circles within circles, there are so many 
indirect and private ways of getting at legisla- 
tive action, that our communities are constantly 
uneasy during legislative sessions. It is this 
confusion and obscurity and privacy of our 
legislative method that gives the political 
machine its opportunity. There is no publicly 



120 THE NEW FREEDOM 

responsible man or group of men who are known 
to formulate legislation and to take charge of 
it from the time of its introduction until the 
time of its enactment. It has, therefore, been 
possible for an outside force, — the political 
machine, the body of men who nominated the 
legislators and who conducted the contest for 
their election, — to assume the role of control. 
Business men who desired something done in 
the way of changing the law under which they 
were acting, or who wished to prevent legislation 
which seemed to them to threaten their own 
interests, have known that there was this 
definite body of persons to resort to, and they 
have made terms with them. They have agreed 
to supply them with money for campaign 
expenses and to stand by them in all other cases 
where money was necessary if in return they 
might resort to them for protection or for 
assistance in matters of legislation. Legisla- 
tors looked to a certain man who was not even 
a member of their body for instructions as to 
what they were to do with particular bills. 
The machine, which was the centre of party 



LET THERE BE LIGHT VZl 

organization, was the natural instrument of 
control, and men who had business interests to 
promote naturally resorted to the body which 
exercised the control. 

There need have been nothing sinister about 
this. If the whole matter had been open and 
candid and honest, public criticism would not 
have centred upon it. But the use of money 
always results in demoralization, and goes 
beyond demoralization to actual corruption. 
There are two kinds of corruption, — the crude 
and obvious sort, which consists in direct 
bribery, and the much subtler, more dangerous, 
sort, which consists in a corruption of the will. 
Business men who have tried to set up a control 
in politics through the machine have more 
and more deceived themselves, have allowed 
themselves to think that the whole matter was 
a necessary means of self-defence, have said that 
it was a necessary outcome of our political 
system. Having reassured themselves in this 
way, they have drifted from one thing to another 
until the questions of morals involved have 
become hopelessly obscured and submerged. 



122 THE NEW FREEDOM 

How far away from the ideals of their youth have 
many of our men of business drifted, enmeshed 
in the vicious system, — how far away from the 
days when their fine young manhood was 
wrapped in "that chastity of honor which felt 
a stain like a wound!" 

It is one of the happy circumstances of our 
time that the most intelligent of our business 
men have seen the mistake as well as the immo- 
rality of the whole bad business. The alliance 
between business and politics has been a burden 
to them, — an advantage, no doubt, upon occa- 
sion, but a very questionable and burdensome 
advantage. It has given them great power, 
but it has also subjected them to a sort of 
slavery and a bitter sort of subserviency to 
politicians. They are as anxious to be freed 
from bondage as the country is to be rid of the 
influences and methods which it represents. 
Leading business men are now becoming great 
factors in the emancipation of the country 
from a system which was leading from bad to 
worse. There are those, of course, who are 
wedded to the old ways and who will stand out 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 123 

for them to the last, but they will sink into a 
minority and be overcome. The rest have 
found that their old excuse (namely, that it was 
necessary to defend themselves against unfair 
legislation) is no longer a good excuse; that 
there is a better way of defending themselves 
than through the private use of money. That 
better way is to take the public into their 
confidence, to make absolutely open all their 
dealings with legislative bodies and legislative 
officers, and let the public judge as between 
them and those with whom they are dealing. 

This discovery on their part of what ought] 
to have been obvious all along points out the ) 
way of reform; for undoubtedly pubhcity comes 
very near being the cure-all for political and 
economic maladies of this sort. But pub- 
licity will continue to be very difficult so 
long as our methods of legislation are so 
obscure and devious and private. I think 
it will become more and more obvious that 
the way to purify our politics is to simplify 
them, and that the way to simplify them is to 



124 THE NEW FREEDOM 

establish responsible leaderjship. We now have 
no leadership at all inside our legislative bodies, 
— at any rate, no leadership which is definite 
enough to attract the attention and watchful- 
ness of the country. Our only leadership being 
that of irresponsible persons outside the legis- 
latures who constitute the political machines, 
it is extremely difficult for even the most watch- 
ful public opinion to keep track of the circuitous 
methods pursued. This undoubtedly lies at the 
root of the growing demand on the part of 
American communities everywhere for responsi- 
ble leadership, for putting in authority and 
keeping in authority those whom they know 
and whom they can watch and whom they can 
constantly hold to account. The business of 
the country ought to be served by thoughtful 
and progressive legislation, but it ought to be 
served openly, candidly, advantageously, with 
a careful regard to letting everybody be heard 
and every interest be considered, the interest 
which is not backed by money as well as the 
interest which is; and this can be accomplished 
only by some simplification of our methods 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 125 

which will centre the public trust in small 
groups of men who will lead, not by reason of 
legal authority, but by reason of their contact 
with and amenability to public opinion. 

I am striving to indicate my belief that our 
legislative methods may well be reformed in the 
direction of giving more open publicity to 
every act, in the direction of setting up some 
form of responsible leadership on the floor of 
our legislative halls so that the people may 
know who is back of every bill and back of the 
opposition to it, and so that it may be dealt 
with in the open chamber rather than in the 
committee room. The light must be let in on 
all processes of law-making. 

Legislation, as we nowadays conduct it, is | 
not conducted in the open. It is not threshed 
out in open debate upon the floors of our assem- 
blies. It is, on the contrary, framed, digested, 
and concluded in committee rooms. It is in 
committee rooms that legislation not desired 
by the interests dies. It is in committee rooms 
that legislation desired by the interests is 
framed and brought forth. There is not enough 



126 THE NEW FREEDOM 

\__debate of it in open house, in most cases, to 
disclose the real meaning of the proposals made. 
Clauses lie quietly unexplained and unchallenged 
in our statutes which contain the whole gist 
and purpose of the act; qualifying phrases which 
escape the public attention, casual definitions 
which do not attract attention, classifications so 
technical as not to be generally understood, and 
which every one most intimately concerned is 
careful not to explain or expound, contain the 
whole purpose of the law. Only after it has 
been enacted and has come to adjudication in 
the courts is its scheme as a whole divulged. 
The beneficiaries are then safe behind their 

v bulwarks. 

Of coursej the chief triumphs of committee 
work, of covert phrase and unexplained classifi- 
cation, are accomplished in the framing of tariffs. 
Ever since the passage of the outrageous Payne- 
Aldrich Tariff Act our people have been dis- 
covering the concealed meanings and purposes 
which lay hidden in it. They are discovering 
item by item how deeply and deliberately 
they were deceived and cheated. This did 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 127 

not happen by accident; it came about by 
design, by elaborated, secret design. Questions 
put upon the floor in the House and Senate were 
not frankly or truly answered, and an elaborate 
piece of legislation was foisted on the country 
which could not possibly have passed if it had 
been generally comprehended.^ 

And we know, those of us who handle the 
machinery of politics, that the great difficulty 
in breaking up the control of the political boss 
is that he is backed by the money and the 
influence of these very people who are intrenched 
in these very schedules. The tariff could never 
have been built up item by item by public 
discussion, and it never could have passed, if 
item by item it had been explained to the people 
of this country. It was built up by arrangement 
and by the subtle management of a political 
organization represented in the Senate of the 
United States by the senior Senator from Rhode 
Island, and in the House of Representatives 
by one of the Representatives from Illinois. 
These gentlemen did not build that tariff upon 
the evidence that was given before the Com- 



128 THE NEW FREEDOM 

mittee on Ways and Means as to what the 
manufacturer and the workingmen, the con- 
sumers and the producers, of this country want. 
It was not built upon what the interests of the 
country called for. It was built upon under- 
standings arrived at outside of the rooms 
where testimony was given and debate was 
held. 

I am not even now suggesting corrupt influ- 
ence. That is not my point. Corruption is a 
very difficult thing to manage in its literal 
sense. The payment of money is very easily 
detected, and men of this kind who control 
these interests by secret arrangement would not 
consent to receive a dollar in money. They 
are following their ow n principles, — that is to 
say, the principles which they think and act 
upon, — and they think that they are perfectly 
honorable and incorruptible men; but they be- 
lieve one thing that I do not believe and that 
it is evident the people of the country do not 
believe: they believe that the prosperity of the 
country depends upon the arrangements which 
certain party leaders make with certain business 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 129 

leaders. They believe that, but the proposition 
has merely to be stated to the jury to be rejected. 
The prosperity of this country depends upon 
the interests of all of us and cannot be brought 
about by arrangement between any groups of 
persons. Take any question you like out to theT 
country, — let it be threshed out in public 
debate, — and you will have made these methods ^ 
impossible. 

This is what sometimes happens: They 
promise you a particular piece of legislation. 
As soon as the legislature meets, a bill embody- 
ing that legislation is introduced. It is referred 
to a committee. You never hear of it again. 
What happened? Nobody knows what hap- 
pened. 

I am not mtimatmg that corruption creeps 
in; I do not know what creeps in. The point 
is that we not only do not know, but it is inti- 
mated, if we get inquisitive, that it is none of 
our business. My reply is that it is our business, 
and it is the business of every man in the state ; 
we have a right to know all the particulars of 
that bill's history. There is not any legitimate 



130 THE NEW FREEDOM 

privacy about matters of government. Govern- 
ment must, if it is to be pure and correct in its 
processes, be absolutely public in everything that 
affects it. I cannot imagine a public man with 
a conscience having a secret that he would 

\ \Jveep from the people about their own affairs. 

y I know how some of these gentlemen reason. 
They say that the influences to which they are 
yielding are perfectly legitimate influences, but 
that if they were disclosed they would not be 
understood. Well, I am very sorry, but nothing 
is legitimate that cannot be understood. If you 
cannot explain it properly, then there is some- 
. thing about it that cannot he explained at all. 
I know from the circumstances of the case, not 
what is happening, but that something private 
is happening, and that every time one of these 
bills gets into committee, something private 
stops it, and it never comes out again unless 
forced out by the agitation of the press or the 
courage and revolt of brave men in the legisla- 
ture. I have known brave men of that sort. 
I could name some splendid examples of men 
who, as representatives of the people, demanded 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 131 

to be told by the chairman of the committee why 
the bill was not reported, and who, when they 
could not find out from him, investigated and 
found out for themselves and brought the bill 
out by threatening to tell the reason on the 
floor of the House. 

Those are private processes. Those are proc- 
esses which stand between the people and the 
things that are promised them, and I say that 
until you drive all of those things into the open, 
you are not connected with your government; 
you are not represented; you are not partici- 
pants in your government. Such a scheme of 
government by private understanding deprives 
you of representation, deprives the people of 
representative institutions. It has got to be put 
into the heads of legislators that public business 
is public business. I hold the opinion that 
there can be no confidences as against the 
people with respect to their government, and 
that it is the duty of every public officer to 
explain to his fellow-citizens whenever he gets 
a chance, — explain exactly what is going on 
inside of his own office. 



132 THE NEW FREEDOM 

/* There is no air so wholesome as the air of 

< utter pubHcity. 

i 

There are other tracts of modern hfe where 
jungles have grown up that must be cut down. 
Take, for example, the entirely illegitimate 
extensions made of the idea of private property 
for the benefit of modern corporations and 
trusts. A modern joint stock corporation can- 
not in any proper sense be said to base its 
rights and powers upon the principles of private 
property. Its powers are wholly derived from 
legislation. It possesses them for the conven- 
ience of business at the sufferance of the public. 
Its stock is widely owned, passes from hand to 
hand, brings multitudes of men into its shifting 
partnerships and connects it with the interests 
and the investments of whole communities. It 
is a segment of the public; bears no analogy 
to a partnership or to the processes by which 
private property is safeguarded and managed, 
and should not be suffered to afford any covert 
whatever to those who are managing it. Its 
management is of public and general concern, 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 133 

is in a very proper sense everybody's business. 
The business of many of those corporations 
which we call public -service corporations, 
and which are indispensable to our daily lives 
and serve us with transportation and light 
and water and power, — their business, for 
instance, is clearly public business; and, 
therefore, we can and must penetrate their 
affairs by the light of examination and discus- 
sion. 

In New Jersey the people have realized this 
for a long time, and a year or two ago we got 
our ideas on the subject enacted into legislation. 
The corporations involved opposed the legisla- 
tion with all their might. They talked about 
ruin, — and I really believe they did think they 
would be somewhat injured. But they have 
not been. And I hear I cannot tell you how 
many men in New Jersey say: "Governor, we 
were opposed to you; we did not believe in the 
things you wanted to do, but now that you 
have done them, we take off our hats. That 
was the thing to do, it did not hurt us a bit; 
it just put us on a normal footing; it took away 



134 THE NEW FREEDOM 

suspicion from our business." New Jersey, 
having taken the cold plunge, cries out to the 
rest of the states, "Come on in! The water's 
fine!" I wonder whether these men who are 
controlling the government of the United States 
realize how they are creating every year a 
thickening atmosphere of suspicion, in which 
presently they will find that business cannot 
breathe ? 

So I take it to be a necessity of the hour to 
open up all the processes of politics and of 
public business, — open them wide to public 
view; to make them accessible to every force 
that moves, every opinion that prevails in the 
thought of the people; to give society command 
of its own economic life again, not by revolu- 
tionary measures, but by a steady application 
of the principle that the people have a right 
to look into such matters and to control them; 
to cut all privileges and patronage and private 
advantage and secret enjoyment out of legisla- 
tion. 

Wherever any public business is transacted, 
wherever plans affecting the public are laid. 



LET THERE BE LIGHT 135 

or enterprises touching the pubHc welfare, 
comfort, or convenience go forward, wherever 
pohtical programs are formulated, or candi- 
dates agreed on, — over that place a voice must 
speak, with the divine prerogative of a people's 
will, the words: "Let there be light!" 




VII 

THE TARIFF " PROTECTION," OR SPECIAL 

PRIVILEGE? 

"^VERY business question, in this coun- 
try, comes back, sooner or later, to 
the question of the tariff. You cannot 
escape from it, no matter in which direction 
you go. The tariff is situated in relation to 
other questions like Boston Common in the 
old arrangement of that interesting city. I 
remember seeing once, in Life, a picture of a 
man standing at the door of one of the railway 
stations in Boston and inquiring of a Bostonian 
the way to the Common. "Take any of these 
streets," was the reply, *'in either direction." 
Now, as the Common was related to the wind- 
ing streets of Boston, so the tariff question is 
related to the economic questions of our day. 
Take any direction and you will sooner or later 
get to the Common. And, in discussing the 

136 



THE TARIFF 137 

tariff you may start at the centre and go in 
any direction you please. ^^ 

Let us illustrate by sta:*iding at the centre, 
the Common itself. As far back as 1828, when 
they knew nothing about "practical politics" as 
compared with what we know now, a tariff bill 
was passed which was called the "Tariff of 
Abominations," because it had no beginning 
nor end nor plan. It had no traceable pattern 
in it. It was as if the demands of everybody 
in the United States had all been thrown in- 
discriminately into one basket and that basket 
presented as a piece of legislation. It had 
been a general scramble and everybody who 
scrambled hard enough had been taken care 
of in the schedules resulting. It was an abomi- 
nable thing to the thoughtful men of that day, 
because no man guided it, shaped it, or tried 
to make an equitable system out of it. That 
was bad enough, but at least everybody had an 
open door through which to scramble for his 
advantage. It was a go-as-you-please, free- 
for-all struggle, and anybody who could get to 
Washington and say he represented an impor- 



138 THE NEW FREEDOM 

tant business interest could be heard by the 
Committee on Ways and Means. 

We have a very different state of affairs now. 
The Committee on Ways and Means and the 
Finance Committee of the Senate in these sophis- 
ticated days have come to discriminate by long 
experience among the persons whose counsel they 
are to take in respect of tariff legislation. There 
has been substituted for the unschooled body 
of citizens that used to clamor at the doors 
of the Finance Committee and the Committee 
on Ways and Means, one of the most interest- 
ing and able bodies of expert lobbyists that 
has ever been developed in the experience of 
any country, — men who know so much about 
the matters they are talking of that you can- 
not put your knowledge into competition with 
theirs. They so overwhelm you with "their 
familiarity with detail that you cannot discover 
wherein their scheme lies. They suggest the 
change of an innocent fraction in a particular 
schedule and explain it to you so plausibly that 
you cannot see that it means millions of dollars 
additional from the consumers of this country. 



THE TARIFF 139 

They propose, for example, to put the carbon 
for electric lights in two-foot pieces instead 
of one-foot pieces, — and you do not see 
where you are getting sold, because you 
are not an expert. If you will get some 
expert to go through the schedules of the 
present Payne-Aldrich tariff, you will find a 
"nigger" concealed in almost every woodpile, — 
some little word, some little clause, some unsus- 
pected item, that draws thousands of dollars out 
of the pockets of the consumer and yet does not 
seem to mean anything in particular. They have 
calculated the whole thing beforehand; they 
have analyzed the whole detail and conse- 
quence, each one in his specialty. With 
the tariff specialist the average business man 
has no possibility of competition. Instead of 
the old scramble, which was bad enough, 
we get the present expert control of the tariff 
schedules. Thus the relation between business 
and government becomes, not a matter of 
the exposure of all the sensitive parts of 
the government to all the active parts of the 
people, but the special impression upon them 



140 THE NEW FREEDOM 

of a particular organized force in the business 
world. 

Furthermore, every expedient and device of 
secrecy is brought into use to keep the public 
unaware of the arguments of the high protec- 
tionists, and ignorant of the facts which refute 
them; and uninformed of the intentions of the 
framers of the proposed legislation. It is 
notorious, even, that many members of the 
Finance Committee of the Senate did not know 
the significance of the tariff schedules which 
were reported in the present tariff bill to the 
Senate, and that members of the Senate who 
asked Mr. Aldrich direct questions were refused 
the information they sought; sometimes, I dare 
say, because he could not give it, and some- 
times, I venture to say, because disclosure of 
the information would have embarrassed the 
passage of the measure. There were essential 
papers, moreover, which could not be got at. 

Take that very interesting matter, that will- 
o'-the-wisp, known as "the cost of production." 
It is hard for any man who has ever studied 



THE TARIFF 141 

economics at all to restrain a cynical smile 
when he is told that an intelligent group of his 
fellow-citizens are looking for "the cost of pro- 
duction" as a basis for tariff legislation. It is 
not the same in any one factory for two years 
together. It is not the same in one industry 
from one season to another. It is not the 
same in one country at two different epochs. 
It is constantly eluding your grasp. It nowhere 
exists, as a scientific, demonstrable fact. But, 
in order to carry out the pretences of the 
"protective" program, it was necessary to go 
through the motions of finding out what it 
was. I am credibly informed that the govern- 
ment of the United States requested several 
foreign governments, among others the govern- 
ment of Germany, to supply it with as reliable 
figures as possible concerning the cost of pro- 
ducing certain articles corresponding with those 
produced in the United States. The German 
government put the matter into the hands of 
certain of her manufacturers, who sent in just 
as complete answers as they could procure from 
their books. The information reached our gov- 



142 THE NEW FREEDOM 

ernment during the course of the debate on 
the Payne-Aldrich Bill and was transmitted, 
— for the bill by that time had reached the 
Senate, — to the Finance Committee of the 
Senate. But I am told, — and I have no reason 
to doubt it, — that it never came out of the 
pigeonholes of the committee. I don't know, 
and that committee doesn't know, what the in- 
formation it contained was. When Mr. Aldrich 
was asked about it, he first said it was not 
an official report from the German government. 
Afterward he intimated that it was an impu- 
dent attempt on the part of the German govern- 
ment to interfere with tariff legislation in the 
United States. But he never said what the cost 
of production disclosed by it was. If he had, it 
is more than likely that some of the schedules 
would have been shown to be entirely unjusti- 
fiable. 

Such instances show you just where the 
centre of gravity is, — and it is a matter of 
gravity indeed, for it is a very grave matter! 
It lay during the last Congress in the one person 
who was the accomplished intermediary be- 



THE TARIFF 143 

tween the expert lobbyists and the legislation 
of Congress. I am not saying this in deroga- 
tion of the character of Mr. Aldrich. It is no 
concern of mine what kind of man Mr. Aldrich 
is; now, particularly, when he has retired from 
public life, is it a matter of indifference. The 
point is that he, because of his long experience, 
his long handling of these delicate and private 
matters, was the usual and natural instrument 
by which the Congress of the United States 
informed itself, not as to the wishes of the 
people of the United States or of the rank 
and file of business men of the country, but 
as to the needs and arguments of the experts 
who came to arrange matters with the com- 
mittees. 

The moral of the whole matter is this: The 
business of the United States is not as a whole 
in contact with the government of the United 
States. So soon as it is, the matters which 
now give you, and justly give you, cause for 
uneasiness will disappear. Just so soon as the 
business of this country has general, free, wel- 
come access to the councils of Congress, all the 



144 THE NEW FREEDOM 

friction between business and politics will dis- 
appear. 

The tariff question is not the question that it 
was fifteen or twenty or thirty years ago. It 
used to be said by the advocates of the tariff 
that it made no difference even if there were 
a great wall separating us from the commerce 
of the world, because inside the United States 
there was so enormous an area of absolute 
free trade that competition within the country 
kept prices down to a normal level; that so 
long as one state could compete with all the 
others in the United States, and all the others 
compete with it, there would be only that kind 
of advantage gained which is gained by superior 
brain, superior economy, the better plant, the 
better administration; all of the things that 
have made America supreme, and kept prices 
in America down, because American genius was 
competing with American genius. I must add 
that so long as that was true, there was much 
to be said in defence of the protective tariff. 

But the point now is that the protective tariff 



THE TARIFF 145 

has been taken advantage of by some men to 
destroy domestic competition, to combine all 
existing rivals within our free-trade area, and 
to make it impossible for new men to come into 
the field. Under the high tariff there has been 
formed a network of factories which in their 
connection dominate the market of the United 
States and establish their own prices. Whereas, 
therefore, it was once arguable that the high 
tariff did not create the high cost of living, it 
is now no longer arguable that these combina- 
tions do not, — not by reason of the tariff, but 
by reason of their combination under the tariff, 
— settle what prices shall be paid; settle how 
much the product shall be; and settle, more- 
over, what shall be the market for labor. 

The "protective" policy, as we hear it pro- 
claimed to-day, bears no relation to the original 
doctrine enunciated by Webster and Clay. The 
"infant industries," which those statesmen de- 
sired to encourage, have grown up and grown 
gray, but they have always had new arguments 
for special favors. Their demands have gone 
far beyond what they dared ask for in the days 



146 THE NEW FREEDOM 

of Mr. Blaine and Mr. McKinley, though both 
those apostles of "protection" were, before 
they died, ready to confess that the time had 
even then come to call a halt on the claims of 
the subsidized industries. William McKinley, 
before he died, showed symptoms of adjustment 
to the new age such as his successors have not 
exhibited. You remember what the utterances 
of Mr. McKinley's last month were with regard 
to the policy with which his name is particularly 
identified; I mean the policy of "protection." 
You remember how he joined in opinion with 
what Mr. Blaine before him had said — namely, 
that we had devoted the country to a policy 
which, too rigidly persisted in, was proving a 
policy of restriction; and that we must look 
forward to a time that ought to come very soon 
when we should enter into reciprocal relations 
of trade with all the countries of the world. 
This was another way of saying that we must 
substitute elasticity for rigidity; that we must 
substitute trade for closed ports, McKinley saw 
what his successors did not see. He saw that 
we had made for ourselves a strait- jacket. 



THE TARIFF 147 

When I reflect upon the "protective" poHcy 
of this country, and observe that it is the later 
aspects and the later uses of that policy which 
have built up trusts and monopoly in the United 
States, I make this contrast in my thought: 
Mr. McKinley had already uttered his protest 
against what he foresaw; his successor saw 
what McKinley had only foreseen, but he took 
no action. His successor saw those very special 
privileges, which Mr. McKinley himself began 
to suspect, used by the men who had obtained 
them to build up a monopoly for themselves, 
making freedom of enterprise in this country 
more and more diSicult. I am one of those who 
have the utmost confidence that Mr. McKinley 
would not have sanctioned the later develop- 
ments of the policy with which his name stands 
identified. 

What is the present tariff policy of the pro- 
tectionists? It is not the ancient protective 
policy to which I would give all due credit, but 
an entirely new doctrine. I ask anybody who 
is interested in the history of high "protective" 
tariffs to compare the latest platforms of the 



148 THE NEW FREEDOM 

two "protective" tariff parties with the old 
doctrine. Men have been struck, students of 
this matter, by an entirely new departure. The 
new doctrine of the protectionist is that the 
tariff should represent the difference between the 
cost of production in America and the cost of 
production in other countries, plus a reasonable 
profit to those who are engaged in industry. 
This is the new part of the protective doctrine: 
"plus a reasonable profit." It openly guaran- 
tees profit to the men who come and ask favors 
of Congress. The old idea of a protective tariff 
was designed to keep American industries alive 
and, therefore, keep American labor employed. 
But the favors of protection have become so 
permanent that this is what has happened: 
Men, seeing that they need not fear foreign 
competition, have drawn together in great com- 
binations. These combinations include factories 
(if it is a combination of factories) of all grades : 
old factories and new factories, factories with 
antiquated machinery and factories with brand- 
new machinery ; factories that are economically 
and factories that are not economically admin- 



THE TARIFF 149 

istered; factories that have been long in the 
family, which have been allowed to run down, 
and factories with all the new modern inven- 
tions. As soon as the combination is effected 
the less efficient factories are generally put out 
of operation. But the stock issued in payment 
for them has to pay dividends. And the United 
States government guarantees profit on invest- 
ment in factories that have gone out of business. 
As soon as these combinations see prices falling 
they reduce the hours of labor, they reduce pro- 
duction, they reduce wages, they throw men out 
of employment, — in order to do what? In 
order to keep the prices up in spite of their lack 
of efficiency. 

There may have been a time when the tariff 
did not raise prices, but that time is past; the 
tariff is now taken advantage of by the great 
combinations in such a way as to give them con- 
trol of prices. These things do not happen by 
chance. It does not happen by chance that 
prices are and have been rising faster here than 
in any other country. That river that divides 
us from Canada divides us from much cheaper 



150 THE NEW FREEDOM 

living, notwithstanding that the Canadian Par- 
liament levies duties on importations. 

But "Ah!" exclaim those who do not under- 
stand what is going on; "you will ruin the 
country with your free trade!" Who said fr.ee 
trade? Who proposed free trade? You can't 
have free trade in the United States, because 
the government of the United States is of ne- 
cessity, with our present division of the field of 
taxation between the federal and state govern- 
ments, supported in large part by the duties 
collected at the ports. I should like to ask 
some gentlemen if very much is collected in 
the way of duties at the ports under the par- 
ticular tariff schedules under which they operate. 
Some of the duties are practically prohibitive, 
and there is no tariff to be got from them. 

When you buy an imported article, you pay 
a part of the price to the Federal government in 
the form of customs duty. But, as a rule, what 
you buy is, not the imported article, but a 
domestic article, the price of which the manu- 
facturer has been able to raise to a point equal 



THE TARIFF 151 

to, or higher than, the price of the foreign article 
plus the duty. But who gets the tariff tax 
in this case? The government? Oh, no; not 
at all. The manufacturer. The American 
manufacturer, who says that while he can't 
sell goods as low as the foreign manufacturer, 
all good Americans ought to buy of him and 
pay him a tax on every article for the privilege. 
Perhaps we ought. The original idea was that, 
when he was just starting and needed support, 
we ought to buy of him, even if we had to pay 
a higher price, till he could get on his feet. Now 
it is said that we ought to buy of him and pay 
him a price 15 to 120 per cent, higher than we 
need pay the foreign manufacturer, even if he 
is a six-foot, bearded "infant," because the cost 
of production is necessarily higher here than 
anywhere else. I don't know why it should be. 
The American workingman used to be able to do 
so much more and better work than the foreigner 
that that more than compensated for his higher 
wages and made him a good bargain at any 
wage. 

Of course, if we are going to agree to give any 



152 THE NEW FREEDOM 

fellow-citizen who takes a notion to go into 
some business or other for which the country 
is not especially adapted, — if we are going to 
give him a bonus on every article he produces 
big enough to make up for the handicap he 
labors under because of some natural reason or 
other, — why, we may indeed gloriously diversify 
our industries, but we shall beggar ourselves. 
On this principle, we shall have in Connecticut, 
or Michigan, or somewhere else, miles of hot- 
houses in which thousands of happy American 
workingmen, with full dinner-pails, will be 
raising bananas, — to be sold at a quarter apiece. 
Some foolish person, a benighted Democrat like 
as not, might timidly suggest that bananas were 
a greater public blessing when they came from 
Jamaica and were three for a nickel, but what 
patriotic citizen would listen for a moment to 
the criticisms of a person without any concep- 
tion of the beauty and glory of the great Ameri- 
can banana industry, without realization of the 
proud significance of the fact that Old Glory 
floats over the biggest banana hothouses in 
the world! 



THE TARIFF 153 

But that is a matter on one side. What I 
am trying to point out to you now is that this 
"protective" tariff, so-called, has become a 
means of fostering the growth of particular 
groups of industry at the expense of the eco- 
nomic vitality of the rest of the country. What 
the people now propose is a very practical thing 
indeed : They propose to unearth these special 
privileges and to cut them out of the tariff. 
They propose not to leave a single concealed 
private advantage in the statutes concerning 
the duties that can possibly be eradicated 
without affecting the part of the business that 
is sound and legitimate and which we all wish 
to see promoted. 

Some men talk as if the tar iff -reformers, as 
if the Democrats, weren't part of the United 
States. I met a lady the other day, not an 
elderly lady, who said to me with pride: "WTiy, 
I have been a Democrat ever since they hunted 
them with dogs." And you would really sup- 
pose, to hear some men talk, that Democrats 
were outlaws and did not share the life of the 
United States. Why, Democrats constitute 



154 THE NEW FREEDOM 

nearly one half the voters of this country. They 
are engaged in all sorts of enterprises, big and 
little. There isn't a walk of life or a kind of 
occupation in which you won't find them; and, 
as a Philadelphia paper very wittily said the 
other day, they can't commit economic murder 
without committing economic suicide. Do you 
suppose, therefore, that half of the population 
of the United States is going about to de- 
stroy the very foundations of our economic life 
by simply running amuck amidst the sched- 
ules of the tariff .f^ Some of the schedules are so 
tough that they wouldn't be hurt, if it did. But 
that isn't the program, and anybody who says 
that it is simply doesn't understand, the situa- 
tion at all. All that the tariff-reformers claim is 
this: that the partnership ought to be bigger 
than it is. Just because there are so many of 
them, they know how many are outside. And 
let me tell you, just as many Republicans are 
outside. The only thing I have against my 
protectionist fellow-citizens is that they have 
allowed themselves to be imposed upon so many 
years. Think of saying that the "protective" 



THE TARIFF 155 

tariff is for the benefit of the workingman, in 
the presence of all those facts that have just 
been disclosed in Lawrence, Mass., where the 
worst schedule of all — *' Schedule K" — oper- 
ates to keep men on wages on which they cannot 
live. Why, the audacity, the impudence, of the 
claim is what strikes one; and in face of the 
fact that the workingmen of this country who 
are in unprotected industries are better paid 
than those who are in "protected" industries; 
at any rate, in the conspicuous industries ! The 
Steel schedule, I dare say, is rather satisfactory 
to those who manufacture steel, but is it satis- 
factory to those who make the steel with their 
own tired hands .^^ Don't you know that there 
are mills in which men are made to work seven 
days in the week for twelve hours a day, and 
in the three hundred and sixty -five weary days 
of the year can't make enough to pay their 
bills .^^ And this in one of the giants among 
our industries, one of the undertakings which 
have thriven to gigantic size upon this very 
system. 

Ah, the whole mass of the fraud is falling 



156 THE NEW FREEDOM 

away, and men are beginning to see disclosed 
little groups of persons maintaining a control 
over the dominant party and through the domi- 
nant party over the government, in their own 
interest, and not in the interest of the people 
of the United States ! 

Let me repeat: There cannot be free trade 
in the United States so long as the established 
fiscal policy of the federal government is 
maintained. The federal government has 
chosen throughout all the generations that have 
preceded us to maintain itself chiefly on indirect 
instead of direct taxation. I dare say we shall 
never see a time when it can alter that policy 
in any substantial degree; and there is no 
Democrat of thoughtfulness that I have met 
who contemplates a program of free trade. 

But what we intend to do, what the House 
of Representatives has been attempting to do 
and will attempt to do again, and succeed in 
doing, is to weed this garden that we have been 
cultivating. Because, if we have been laying 
at the roots of our industrial enterprises this 



THE TARIFF 157 

fertilization of protection, if we have been 
stimulating it by this policy, we have found 
that the stimulation was not equal in respect 
of all the growths in the garden, and that there 
are some growths, which every man can distin- 
guish with the naked eye, which have so over- 
topped the rest, which have so thrown the rest 
into destroying shadow, that it is impossible for 
the industries of the United States as a whole 
to prosper under their blighting shade. In 
other words, we have found out that this that 
professes to be a process of protection has be- 
come a process of favoritism, and that the 
favorites of this policy have flourished at the 
expense of all the rest. And now we are going 
into this garden and weed it. We are going into 
this garden and give the little plants air and 
light in which to grow. We are going to pull 
up every root that has so spread itself as to 
draw the nutriment of the soil from the other 
roots. We are going in there to see to it that 
the fertilization of intelligence, of invention, of 
origination, is once more applied to a set of 
industries now threatening to be stagnant, be- 



158 THE NEW FREEDOM 

cause threatening to be too much concentrated. 
The poHcy of freeing the country from the 
restrictive tariff will so variegate and multiply 
the undertakings in the country that there will 
be a wider market and a greater competition 
for labor; it will let the sun shine through the 
clouds again as once it shone on the free, inde- 
pendent, unpatronized intelligence and energy 
of a great people. 

One of the counts of the indictment against 
the so-called "protective" tariff is that it has 
robbed Americans of their independence, re- 
sourcefulness, and self-reliance. Our industry 
has grown invertebrate, cowardly, dependent 
on government aid. When I hear the argument 
of some of the biggest business men in this 
country, that if you took the "protection" of 
the tariff off they would be overcome by the 
competition of the world, I ask where and 
when it happened that the boasted genius of 
America became afraid to go out into the open 
and compete with the world? Are we children, 
are we wards, are we still such puerile infants 
that we have to be fed out of a bottle.^ Isn't 



THE TARIFF 159 

it true that we know how to make steel in 
America better than anybody else in the world? 
Yet they say, "For Heaven's sake don't expose 
us to the chill of prices coming from any other 
quarter of the globe." Mind you, we can com- 
pete with those prices. Steel is sold abroad, 
steel made in America is sold abroad in many 
of its forms, much cheaper than it is sold in 
America. It is so hard for people to get that 
into their heads ! 

We set up a kindergarten in New York. We 
called it the Chamber of Horrors. We exhibited 
there a great many things manufactured in the 
United States, with the prices at which they 
were sold in the United States, and the prices 
at which they were sold outside of the United 
States, marked on them. If you tell a woman 
that she can buy a sewing machine for eighteen 
dollars in Mexico that she has to pay thirty dol- 
lars for in the United States, she will not heed 
it or she will forget it unless you take her and 
show her the machine with the price marked 
on it. My very distinguished friend. Senator 
Gore, of Oklahoma, made this interesting pro- 



160 THE NEW FREEDOM 

posal: that we should pass a law that every 
piece of goods sold in the United States should 
have on it a label bearing the price at which it 
sells under the tariff and the price at which it 
would sell if there were no tariff, and then the 
Senator suggests that we have a very easy solu- 
tion for the tariff question. He does not want 
to oblige that great body of our fellow-citizens 
who have a conscientious belief in "protection" 
to turn away from it. He proposes that every- 
body who believes in the "protective" tariff 
should pay it and the rest of us should not; 
if they want to subscribe, it is open to them to 
subscribe^J- 

As for the rest of us, the time is coming when 
we shall not have to subscribe. The people of 
this land have made up their minds to cut all 
privilege and patronage out of our fiscal legisla- 
tion, particularly out of that part of it which 
affects the tariff. We have come to recognize 
in the tariff as it is now constructed, not a 
system of protection, but a system of favorit- 
ism, of privilege, too often granted secretly 
and by subterfuge, instead of openly and 



THE TARIFF 161 

frankly and legitimately, and we have deter- 
mined to put an end to the whole bad business, 
not by hasty and drastic changes, but by the 
adoption of an entirely new principle, — by 
the reformation of the whole purpose of legis- 
lation of that kind. We mean that our tariff 
legislation henceforth shall have as its object, 
not private profit, but the general public de- 
velopment and benefit. We shall make our 
fiscal laws, not like those who dole out favors, 
but like those who serve a nation. We are 
going to begin with those particular items where 
we find special privilege intrenched. We know 
what those items are; these gentlemen have 
been kind enough to point them out themselves. 
What we are interested in first of all with regard 
to the tariff is getting the grip of special in- 
terests off the throat of Congress. We do not 
propose that special interests shall any longer 
camp in the rooms of the Committee on Ways 
and Means of the House and the Finance Com- 
mittee of the Senate. We mean that those 
shall be places where the people of the United 
States shall come and be represented, in order 



162 THE NEW FREEDOM 

that everything may be done in the general 
interest, and not in the interest of particular 
groups of persons who already dominate the 
industries and the industrial development of 
this country. Because no matter how wise 
these gentlemen may be, no matter how pa- 
triotic, no matter how singularly they may be 
gifted with the power to divine the right courses 
of business, there isn't any group of men in the 
United States or in any other country who are 
wise enough to have the destinies of a great 
people put into their hands as trustees. We 
mean that business in this land shall be released, 
emancipated. 



VIII 

MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 

GENTLEMEN say, they have been say- 
ing for a long time, and, therefore, I 
assume that they beheve, that trusts 
are inevitable. They don't say that big business 
is inevitable. They don't say merely that the 
elaboration of business upon a great co-operative 
scale is characteristic of our time and has 
come about by the natural operation of modern 
civilization. We would admit that. But they 
say that the particular kind of combinations that 
are now controlling our economic development 
came into existence naturally and were inevi- 
table; and that, therefore, we have to accept 
them as unavoidable and administer our devel- 
opment through them. They take the analogy 
of the railways. The railways were clearly 
inevitable if we were to have transportation, 
but railways after they are once built stay 

163 



164 THE NEW FREEDOM 

put. You can't transfer a railroad at con- 
venience; and you can't shut up one part of 
it and work another part. It is in the nature 
of what economists, those tedious persons, call 
natural monopolies; simply because the whole 
circumstances of their use are so stiff that you 
can't alter them. Such are the analogies which 
these gentlemen choose when they discuss the 
modern trust. 

I admit the popularity of the theory that the 
trusts have come about through the natural de- 
velopment of business conditions in the United 
States, and that it is a mistake to try to op- 
pose the processes by which they have been 
built up, because those processes belong to the 
very nature of business in our time, and that 
therefore the only thing we can do, and the 
only thing we ought to attempt to do, is to 
accept them as inevitable arrangements and 
make the best out of it that we can by regulation. 

I answer, nevertheless, that this attitude 
rests upon a confusion of thought. Big busi- 
ness is no doubt to a large extent necessary 
and natural. The development of business 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 165 

upon a great scale, upon a great scale of co- 
operation, is inevitable, and, let me add, is 
probably desirable. But that is a very differ- 
ent matter from the development of trusts, 
because the trusts have not grown. They 
have been artificially created; they have been 
put together, not by natural processes, but 
by the will, the deliberate planning will, of 
men who were more powerful than their neigh- 
bors in the business world, and who wished to 
make their power secure against competition. 

The trusts do not belong to the period of 
infant industries. They are not the products 
of the time, that old laborious time, when the 
great continent we live on was undeveloped, the 
young nation struggling to find itself and get 
upon its feet amidst older and more experienced 
competitors. They belong to a very recent and 
very sophisticated age, when men knew what 
they wanted and knew how to get it by the favor 
of the government. 

Did you ever look into the way a trust was 
made.'' It is very natural, in one sense, in the 
same sense in which human greed is natural. 



166 THE NEW FREEDOM 

If I haven't efficiency enough to beat my rivals, 
then the thing I am incHned to do is to get 
together with my rivals and say: *' Don't let's 
cut each other's throats; let's combine and 
determine prices for ourselves; determine the 
output, and thereby determine the prices: and 
dominate and control the market." That is 
very natural. That has been done ever since 
freebooting was established. That has been 
done ever since power was used to establish 
control. The reason that the masters of com- 
bination have sought to shut out competition 
is that the basis of control under competition 
is brains and efficiency. I admit that any large 
corporation built up by the legitimate processes 
of business, by economy, by efficiency, is natural; 
and I am not afraid of it, no matter how big 
it grows. It can stay big only by doing its 
work more thoroughly than anybody else. And 
there is a point of bigness, — as every business 
man in this country knows, though some of 
them will not admit it, — where you pass the 
limit of efficiency and get into the region of 
clumsiness and unwieldiness. You can make 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 167 

your combine so extensive that you can't digest 
it into a single system; you can get so many 
parts that you can't assemble them as you 
would an effective piece of machinery. The 
point of efficiency is overstepped in the natural 
process of development oftentimes, and it has 
been overstepped many times in the artificial 
and deliberate formation of trusts. 

A trust is formed in this way: a few gentle- 
men "promote" it — that is to say, they get it 
up, being given enormous fees for their kindness, 
which fees are loaded on to the undertaking in 
the form of securities of one kind or another. 
The argument of the promoters is, not that every 
one who comes into the combination can carry 
on his business more efficiently than he did 
before; the argument is: we will assign to you 
as your share in the pool twice, three times, 
four times, or five times what you could have 
sold your business for to an individual competi- 
tor who would have to run it on an economic 
and competitive basis. We can afford to buy 
it at such a figure because we are shutting out 
competition. We can afford to make the stock 



168 THE NEW FREEDOM 

of the combination half a dozen times what it 
naturally would be and pay dividends on it, 
because there will be nobody to dispute the 
prices we shall fix. 

Talk of that as sound business? Talk of that 
as inevitable? It is based upon nothing except 
power. It is not based upon efficiency. It is 
no wonder that the big trusts are not prospering 
in proportion to such competitors as they still 
have in such parts of their business as competi- 
tors have access to; they are prospering freely 
only in those fields to which competition has no 
access. Read the statistics of the Steel Trust, 
if you don't believe it. Read the statistics of 
any trust. They are constantly nervous about 
competition, and they are constantly buying 
up new competitors in order to narrow the 
field. The United States Steel Corporation is 
gaining in its supremacy in the American market 
only with regard to the cruder manufactures 
of iron and steel, but wherever, as in the field 
of more advanced manufactures of iron and 
steel, it has important competitors, its portion 
of the product is not increasing, but is decreasing, 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 169 

and its competitors, where they have a foothold, 
are often more efficient than it is. 

Why? Why, with unHmited capital and in- 
numerable mines and plants everywhere in the 
United States, can't they beat the other fellows 
in the market? Partly because they are carry- 
ing too much. Partly because they are unwieldy. 
Their organization is imperfect. They bought 
up inefficient plants along with efficient, and 
they have got to carry what they have paid 
for, even if they have to shut some of the 
plants up in order to make any interest on their 
investments ; or, rather, not interest on their in- 
vestments, because that is an incorrect word, — 
on their alleged capitalization. Here we have 
a lot of giants staggering along under an almost 
intolerable weight of artificial burdens, which 
they have put on their own backs, and con- 
stantly looking about lest some little pigmy 
with a round stone in a sling may come out 
and slay them. 

For my part, I want the pigmy to have a 
chance to come out. And I foresee a time when 
the pigmies will be so much more athletic, so 



170 THE NEW FREEDOM 

much more astute, so much more active, than 
the giants, that it will be a case of Jack the 
giant-killer. Just let some of the youngsters 
I know have a chance and they'll give these 
gentlemen points. Lend them a little money. 
They can't get any now. See to it that when 
they have got a local market they can't be 
squeezed out of it. Give them a chance to 
capture that market and then see them capture 
another one and another one, until these men 
who are carrying an intolerable load of artificial 
securities find that they have got to get down 
to hard pan to keep their foothold at all. I am 
willing to let Jack come into the field with the 
giant, and if Jack has the brains that some 
Jacks that I know in America have, then I 
should like to see the giant get the better of 
him, with the load that he, the giant, has to 
carry, — the load of water. For I'll undertake 
to put a water-logged giant out of business any 
time, if you will give me a fair field and as 
much credit as I am entitled to, and let the law 
do what from time immemorial law has been 
expected to do, — see fair play. 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 171 

As for watered stock, I know all the sophistical 
arguments, and they are many, for capitalizing 
earning capacity. It is a very attractive and 
interesting argument, and in some instances it 
is legitimately used. But there is a line you 
cross, above which you are not capitalizing 
your earning capacity, but capitalizing your 
control of the market, capitalizing the profits 
which you got by your control of the market, 
and didn't get by efficiency and economy. 
These things are not hidden even from the 
layman. These are not half -hidden from 
college men. The college men's days of inno- 
cence have passed, and their days of sophisti- 
cation have come. They know what is going 
on, because we live in a talkative world, full of 
statistics, full of congressional inquiries, full of 
trials of persons who have attempted to live 
independently of the statutes of the United 
States; and so a great many things have come 
to light under oath, which we must believe 
upon the credibility of the witnesses who are, 
indeed, in many instances very eminent and 
respectable witnesses. 



172 THE NEW FREEDOM 

^ I take my stand absolutely, where every 
progressive ought to take his stand, on the 
proposition that private monopoly is indefensible 
and intolerable. And there I will fight my 
battle. And I know how to fight it J- Every- 
body who has even read the newspapers knows 
the means by which these men built up their 
power and created these monopolies. Any 
decently equipped lawyer can suggest to you 
statutes by which the whole business can be 
stopped. What these gentlemen do not want 
is this: they do not want to be compelled to 
meet all comers on equal terms. I am per- 
fectly willing that they should beat any com- 
petitor by fair means; but I know the foul 
means they have adopted, and I know that they 
can be stopped by law. If they think that 
coming into the market upon the basis of mere 
efiiciency, upon the mere basis of knowing how 
to manufacture goods better than anybody else 
and to sell them cheaper than anybody else, 
they can carry the immense amount of water 
that they have put into their enterprises in order 
to buy up rivals, then they are perfectly wel- 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 173 

come to try it. But there must be no squeezing 
out of the beginner, no crippHng his credit; no 
discrimination against retailers who buy from a 
rival; no threats against concerns who sell sup- 
plies to a rival; no holding back of raw mate- 
rial from him; no secret arrangements against 
him. All the fair competition you choose, but 
no unfair competition of any kind. And then 
when unfair competition is eliminated, let us 
see these gentlemen carry their tanks of water 
on their backs. All that I ask and all I shall 
fight for is that they shall come into the field 
against merit and brains everywhere. If they 
can beat other American brains, then they have 
got the best brains. 

But if you want to know how far brains go, 
as things now are, suppose you try to match 
your better wares against these gentlemen, and 
see them undersell you before your market is 
any bigger than the locality and make it abso- 
lutely impossible for you to get a fast foot- 
hold. If you want to know how brains count, 
originate some invention which will improve the 
kind of machinery they are using, and then see 



174 THE NEW FREEDOM 

if you can borrow enough money to manufacture 
it. You may be offered something for your 
patent by the corporation, — which will perhaps 
lock it up in a safe and go on using the old ma- 
chinery; but you will not be allowed to manu- 
facture. I know men who have tried it, and 
they could not get the money, because the great 
money lenders of this country are in the arrange- 
ment with the great manufacturers of this 
country, and they do not propose to see their 
control of the market interfered with by 
outsiders. And who are outsiders .f^ Why, all 
the rest of the people of the United States are 
outsiders. 

They are rapidly making us outsiders with 
respect even of the things that come from the 
bosom of the earth, and which belong to us 
in a peculiar sense. Certain monopolies in this 
country have gained almost complete control of 
the raw material, chiefly in the mines, out of 
which the great body of manufactures are car- 
ried on, and they now discriminate, when they 
will, in the sale of that raw material between 
those who are rivals of the monopoly and those 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 175 

who submit to the monopoly. We must soon 
come to the point where we shall say to the men 
who own these essentials of industry that they 
have got to part with these essentials by sale 
to all citizens of the United States with the 
same readiness and upon the same terms. Or 
else we shall tie up the resources of this country 
under private control in such fashion as will 
make our independent development absolutely 
impossible. 

There is another injustice that monopoly 
engages in. The trust ^that deals in the cruder 
products which are to be transformed into the 
more elaborate manufactures often will not sell 
these crude products except upon the terms of 
monopoly, — that is to say, the people that deal 
with them must buy exclusively from them. 
And so again you have the lines of development 
tied up and the connections of development 
knotted and fastened so that you cannot 
wrench them apart. 

Again, the manufacturing monopolies are so 
interlaced in their personal relationships with 
the great shipping interests of this country. 



176 THE NEW FREEDOM 

and with the great railroads, that they can 
often largely determine the rates of shipment. 
The people of this country are being very 
subtly dealt with. You know, of course, that, 
unless our Commerce Commissions are absolutely 
sleepless, you can get rebates without calling 
them such at all. The most complicated study I 
know of is the classification of freight by the 
railway company. If I wanted to make a special 
rate on a special thing, all I should have to do is 
to put it in a special class in the freight classi- 
fication, and the trick is done. And when you 
reflect that the twenty-four men who control 
the United States Steel Corporation, for exam- 
ple, are either presidents or vice-presidents or 
directors in 55 per cent, of the railways of the 
United States, reckoning by the valuation of 
those railroads and the amount of their stock 
and bonds, you know just how close the whole 
thing is knitted together in our industrial 
system, and how great the temptation is. 
These twenty-four gentlemen administer that 
corporation as if it belonged to them. The 
amazing thing to me is that the people of the 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 177 

United States have not seen that the adminis- 
tration of a great business hke that is not a 
private affair; it is a pubHc affair. - > 

I have been told by a great many men that 
thd idea I have, that by restoring competition 
you can restore industrial freedom, is based 
upon a failure to observe the actual happenings 
of the last decades in this country; because, 
they say, it is just free competition that has 
made it possible for the big to crush the little. 

I reply, it is not free competition that has done 
that; it is illicit competition. It is competition 
of the kind that the law ought to stop, and can 
stop, — this crushing of the little man. 

You know, of course, how the little man is 
crushed by the trusts. He gets a local market. 
The big concerns come in and undersell him 
in his local market, and that is the only market 
he has; if he cannot make a profit there, he is 
killed. They can make a profit all through the 
rest of the Union, while they are underselling 
him in his locality, and recouping themselves 
by what they can earn elsewhere. Thus their 
competitors can be put out of business, one by 



178 THE NEW FREEDOM 

one, wherever they dare to show a head. Inas- 
much as they rise up only one by one, these 
big concerns can see to it that new competitors 
never come into the larger field. You have to 
begin somewhere. You can't begin in space. 
You can't begin in an airship. You have got 
to begin in some community. Your market 
has got to be your neighbors first and those 
who know you there. But unless you have 
unlimited capital (which of course you wouldn't 
have when you were beginning) or unlimited 
credit (which these gentlemen can see to it that 
you shan't get), they can kill you out in your 
local market any time they try, on the same 
basis exactly as that on which they beat organ- 
ized labor; for they can sell at a loss in your 
market because they are selling at a profit 
everywhere else, and they can recoup the losses 
by which they beat you by the profits which they 
make in fields where they have beaten other 
fellows and put them out. If ever a competitor 
who by good luck has plenty of money does 
break into the wider market, then the trust 
has to buy him out, paying three or four times 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 179 

what the business is worth. Following such 
a purchase it has got to pay the interest on the 
price it has paid for the business, and it has 
got to tax the whole people of the United 
States, in order to pay the interest on what 
it borrowed to do that, or on the stocks 
and bonds it issued to do it with. There- 
fore the big trusts, the big combinations, are 
the most wasteful, the most uneconomical, 
and, after they pass a certain size, the most 
inefficient, way of conducting the industries of 
this country. _-- 

A notable example is the way in which Mr. 
Carnegie was bought out of the steel business. 
Mr. Carnegie could build better mills and make 
better steel rails and make them cheaper than 
anybody else connected with what afterward 
became the United States Steel Corporation. 
They didn't dare leave him outside. He had 
so much more brains in finding out the best 
processes; he had so much more shrewdness in 
surrounding himself with the most successful 
assistants; he knew so well when a young man 
who came into his employ was fit for promotion 



13 



180 THE NEW FREEDOM 

and was ripe to put at the head of some branch 
of his business and was sure to make good, that 
he could undersell every mother's son of them 
in the market for steel rails. And they bought 
him out at a price that amounted to three or 
four times, — I believe actually five times, — 
the estimated value of his properties and of his 
business, because they couldn't beat him in 
competition. And then in what they charged 
afterward for their product, — the product of his 
mills included, — they made us pay the interest 
on the four or five times the difference. 

That is the difference between a big business 
and a trustj A trust is an arrangement to get 
rid of competition, and a big business is a 
business that has survived competition by con- 
quering in the field of intelligence and econ- 
omy. A trust does not bring efficiency to the 
aid of business; it buys efficiency out of husi- 
nesSjjX am for big business, and I am against 
the trusts, j;- Any man who can survive by his 
brains, any man who can put the others out 
of the business by making the thing cheaper to 
the consumer at the same time that he is increas- 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 181 

ing its intrinsic value and quality, I take off 
my hat to, and I say: "You are the man who 
can build up the United States, and I wish there 
were more of you." 

There will not be more, unless we find a way 
to prevent monopoly. You know perfectly well 
that a trust business staggering under a cap- 
italization many times too big is not a busi- 
ness that can afford to admit competitors into 
the field; because the minute an economical 
business, a business with its capital down to 
hard pan, with every ounce of its capital work- 
ing, comes into the field against such an over- 
loaded corporation, it will inevitably beat it 
and undersell it; therefore it is to the interest 
of these gentlemen that monopoly be maintained. 
They cannot rule the markets of the world in any 
way but by monopoly. It is not surprising to 
find them helping to found a new party with 
a fine program of benevolence, but also with 
a tolerant acceptance of monopoly. 
1 

There is another matter to which we must 
direct our attention, whether we like or not. 



182 THE NEW FREEDOM 

I do not take these things into my mouth 
because they please my palate; I do not talk 
about them because I want to attack anybody 
or upset anything; I talk about them because 
only by open speech about them among ourselves 
shall we learn what the facts are. 

You will notice from a recent investigation 
that things like this take place: A certain bank 
invests in certain securities. It appears from 
evidence that the handling of these securities 
was very intimately connected with the main- 
tenance of the price of a particular commodity. 
Nobody ought, and in normal circumstances 
nobody would, for a moment think of suspecting 
the managers of a great bank of making such 
an investment in order to help those who were 
conducting a particular business in the United 
States maintain the price of their commodity; 
but the circumstances are not normal. It is 
beginning to be believed that in the big business 
of this country nothing is disconnected from 
anything else. I do not mean in this particular 
instance to which I have referred, and I do 
not have in mind to draw any inference at all, 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 183 

for that would be unjust; but'^'take any invest- 
ment of an industrial character by a great bank. 
It is known that the directorate of that bank 
interlaces in personnel with ten, twenty, thirty, 
forty, fifty, sixty boards of directors of all sorts, 
of railroads which handle commodities, of great 
groups of manufacturers which manufacture 
commodities, and of great merchants who dis- 
tribute commodities; and the result is that 
every great bank is under suspicion with regard 
to the motive of its investments. It is at least 
considered possible that it is playing the game 
of somebody who has nothing to do with bank- 
ing, but with whom some of its directors are 
connected and joined in interest. The ground 
of unrest and uneasiness, in short, on the part 
of the public at large, is the growing knowledge 
that many large undertakings are interlaced 
with one another, are indistinguishable from one 
another in personnel. 

Therefore, when a small group of men ap- 
proach Congress in order to induce the com- 
mittee concerned to concur in certain legislation, 
nobody knows the ramifications of the interests 



184 THE NEW FREEDOM 

which those men represent; there seems no 
frank and open action of pubhc opinion 
in pubhc comisel, but every man is suspected 
of representing some other man and it is 
not known where his connections begin or 
end. V 

I am one of those who have been so fortunately 
circumstanced that I have had the opportunity 
to study the way in which these things come 
about in complete disconnection from them, and 
I do not suspect that any man has deliber- 
ately planned the system. I am not so unin- 
structed and misinformed as to suppose that 
there is a deliberate and malevolent combina- 
tion somewhere to dominate the government of 
the United States. I merely say that, by certain 
processes, now well known, and perhaps natural 
in themselves, there has come about an extra- 
ordinary and very sinister concentration in the 
control of business in the country. 

However it has come about, it is more impor- 
tant still that the control of credit also has 
become dangerously centraHzed. It is the mere 
truth to say that the financial resources of the 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 185 

country are not at the command of those who 
do not submit to the direction and domination 
of small groups of capitalists who wish to keep 
the economic development of the country under 
their owti eye and guidance. The great mo- 
nopoly in this country is the monopoly of big 
credits. So long as that exists, our old variety 
and freedom and individual energy of develop- 
ment are out of the question. A great indus- 
trial nation is controlled by its system of credit. 
Our system of credit is privately concentrated. 
The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our 
activities are in the hands of a few men who, 
even if their action be honest and intended for 
the public interest, are necessarily concentrated 
upon the great undertakings in which their own 
money is involved and who necessarily, by very 
reason of their own limitations, chill and check 
and destroy genuine economic freedom. This 
is the greatest question of all, and to this states- 
men must address themselves with an earnest 
determination to serve the long future and the 
true liberties of men. 

This money trust, or, as it should be more 



186 THE NEW FREEDOM 

properly called, this credit trust, of which Con- 
gress has begun an investigation, is no myth; 
it is no imaginary thing. It is not an ordinary 
trust like another. It doesn't do business every 
day. It does business only when there is occa- 
sion to do business. You can sometimes do 
something large when it isn't watching, but 
when it is watching, you can't do much. And 
I have seen men squeezed by it; I have seen 
men who, as they themselves expressed it, 
were put *' out of business by Wall Street," 
because Wall Street found them inconvenient, 
and didn't want their competition. 

Let me say again that I am not impugning 
the motives of the men in Wall Street. They 
may think that that is the best way to create 
prosperity for the country. When you have 
got the market in your hand, does honesty 
oblige you to turn the palm upside down and 
empty it.^^ If you have got the market in your 
hand and believe that you understand the 
interest of the country better than anybody else, 
is it patriotic to let it go? I can imagine them 
using this argument to themselves. 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 187 

The dominating danger in this land is not 
the existence of great individual combinations, 
— that is dangerous enough in all conscience, — 
but the combination of the combinations, — of 
the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the 
great mining projects, the great enterprises for 
the development of the natural water-powers 
of the country, threaded together in the per- 
sonnel of a series of boards of directors into a 
"community of interest" more formidable than 
any conceivable single combination that dare 
appear in the open. 

The organization of business has become more 
centralized, vastly more centralized, than the 
political organization of the country itself. 
Corporations have come to cover greater areas 
than states; have come to live under a greater 
variety of laws than the citizen himself, have 
excelled states in their budgets and loomed 
bigger than whole commonwealths in their 
influence over the lives and fortunes of entire 
communities of men. Centralized business has 
built up vast structures of organization and 
equipment which overtop all states and seem 



188 THE NEW FREEDOM 

to have no match or competitor except the 
federal government itself. 

What we have got to do, — and it is a colossal 
task not to be undertaken with a light head 
or without judgment, — what we have got to do 
is to disentangle this colossal "community of 
interest." No matter how we may purpose 
dealing with a single combination in restraint 
of trade, you will agree with me in this, that 
no single, avowed, combination is big enough 
for the United States to be afraid of; but when 
all the combinations are combined and this 
final combination is not disclosed by any process 
of incorporation or law, but is merely an identity 
of personnel, or of interest, then there is some- 
thing that even the government of the nation 
itself might come to fear, — something for the 
law to pull apart, and gently, but firmly and 
persistently, dissect. 

You know that the chemist distinguishes 
between a chemical combination and an amal- 
gam. A chemical combination has done some- 
thing which I cannot scientifically describe, 
but its molecules have become intimate with 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY? 189 

one another and have practically united, whereas 
an amalgam has a mere physical union created by 
pressure from without. Now, you can destroy 
that mere physical contact without hurting the 
individual elements, and this community of 
interest is an amalgam; you can break it up 
without hurting any one of the single interests 
combined. Not that I am particularly delicate 
of some of the interests combined, — I am not 
under bonds to be unduly polite to them, — but 
I am interested in the business of the country, 
and believe its integrity depends upon this 
dissection. I do not believe any one group of 
men has vision enough or genius enough to deter- 
mine what the development of opportunity and 
the accomplishment by achievement shall be 
in this country. 

The facts of the situation amount to thisr 
that a comparatively small number of men 
control the raw material of this country; that 
a comparatively small number of men control 
the water-powers that can be made useful for the 
economical production of the energy to drive 
our machinery; that that same number of men 



190 THE NEW FREEDOM 

largely control the railroads ; that by agreements 
handed around among themselves they control 
prices, and that that same group of men control 
the larger credits of the country. 

When we undertake the strategy which is 
going to be necessary to overcome and destroy 
this far-reaching system of monopoly, we are 
rescuing the business of this country, we are 
not injuring it; and when we separate the inter- 
ests from each other and dismember these com- 
munities of connection, we have in mind a 
greater community of interest, a vaster com- 
munity of interest, the community of interest 
that binds the virtues of all men together, that 
community of mankind which is broad and 
catholic enough to take under the sweep of its 
comprehension all sorts and conditions of men; 
that vision which sees that no society is 
renewed from the top but that every society is 
renewed from the bottom. Limit opportunity, 
restrict the field of originative achievement, and 
you have cut out the heart and root of all 
prosperity. 



MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY 191 

The only thing that can ever make a free 
country is to keep a free and hopeful heart under 
every jacket in it. Honest American industry 
has always thriven, when it has thriven at all, 
on freedom; it has never thriven on monopoly. 
It is a great deal better to shift for yourselves 
than to be taken care of by a great combination 
of capital. I, for my part, do not want to be 
taken care of. I would rather starve a free man 
than be fed a mere thing at the caprice of those 
who are organizing American industry as they 
please to organize it. I know, and every man 
in his heart knows, that the only way to enrich 
America is to make it possible for any man 
who has the brains to get into the game. I am 
not jealous of the size of any business that has 
grown to that size. I am not jealous of any 
process of growth, no matter how huge the 
result, provided the result was indeed obtained 
by the processes of wholesome development, 
which are the processes of efficiency, of economy, 
of intelligence, and of invention. 



IX 

BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 

THE doctrine that monopoly is inevitable 
and that the only course open to the 
people of the United States is to submit 
to and regulate it found a champion during the 
campaign of 1912 in the new party, or branch 
of the Republican party, founded under the 
leadership of Mr. Rooseji^dt, with the conspicu- 
ous aid, — I mention him with no satirical in- 
tention, but merely to set the facts down accu- 
rately, — of Mr. George W. Perkins, organizer of 
the Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust, and 
with the support of more than three millions of 
citizens, many of them among the most patri- 
otic, conscientious and high-minded men and 
women of the land. The fact that its accept- 
ance of monopoly was a feature of the new 
party platform from which the attention of 

the generous and just was diverted by the 

i&ie 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 193 

charm of a social program of great attractive- 
ness to all concerned for the amelioration of 
the lot of those who suffer wrong and privation, 
and the further fact that, even so, the platform 
was repudiated by the majority of the nation, 
render it no less necessary to reflect on the sig- 
nificance of the confession made for the first time 
by any party in the country's history. It may 
be useful, in order to the relief of the minds of 
many from an error of no small magnitude, to 
consider now, the heat of a presidential contest 
being past, exactly what it was that Mr. Roose- 
velt proposed. 

Mr. Roosevelt attached to his platform some 
very splendid suggestions as to noble enter- 
prises which we ought to undertake for the 
uplift of the human race; but when I hear an 
ambitious platform put forth, I am very much 
more interested in the dynamics of it than in 
the rhetoric of it. I have a very practical mind, 
and I want to know who are going to do those 
things and how they are going to be done. If 
you have read the trust plank in that platform 
as often as I have read it, you have found it very 



194 THE NEW FREEDOM 

long, but very tolerant. It did not anywhere 
condemn monopoly, except in words; its essen- 
tial meaning was that the trusts have been bad 
and must be made to be good. You know that 
Mr. Roosevelt long ago classified trusts for us as 
good and bad, and he said that he was afraid 
only of the bad ones. Now he does not desire 
that there should be any more bad ones, but 
proposes that they should all be made good by 
discipline, directly applied by a commission of 
executive appointment. All he explicitly com- 
plains of is lack of publicity and lack of fairness ; 
not the exercise of power, for throughout that 
plank the power of the great corporations is 
accepted as the inevitable consequence of the 
modern organization of industry. All that it is 
proposed to do is to take them under control 
and regulation. The national administration 
having for sixteen years been virtually under the 
regulation of the trusts, it would be merely a 
family matter were the parts reversed and were 
the other members of the family to exercise the 
regulation. And the trusts, apparently, which 
might, in such circumstances, comfortably con- 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 195 

tinue to administer our affairs under the mol- 
lifying influences of the federal government, 
would then, if you please, be the instrumentali- 
ties by which all the humanistic, benevolent 
program of the rest of that interesting platform 
would be carried out! 

I have read and reread that plank, so as to 
be sure that I get it right. All that it complains 
of is,- — and the complaint is a just one, surely, — 
that these gentlemen exercise their power in 
a way that is secret. Therefore, we must have 
publicity. Sometimes they are arbitrary; there- 
fore they need regulation. Sometimes they 
do not consult the general interests of the com- 
munity; therefore they need to be reminded of 
those general interests by an industrial commis- 
sion. But at every turn it is the trusts who are 
to do us good, and not we ourselves. 

Again, I absolutely protest against being put 
into the hands of trustees. Mr. Roosevelt's 
conception of government is Mr. Taft's concep- 
tion, that the Presidency of the United States is 
the presidency of a board of directors. I am 
willing to admit that if the people of the United 



196 THE NEW FREEDOM 

States cannot get justice for themselves, then 
it is high time that they should join the third 
party and get it from somebody else. The 
justice proposed is very beautiful; it is very 
attractive; there were planks in that platform 
which stir all the sympathies of the heart; they 
proposed things that we all want to do; but the 
question is, Who is going to do them? Through 
whose instrumentality? Are Americans ready 
to ask the trusts to give us in pity what we ought, 
in justice, to take? 

The third party says that the present system 
of our industry and trade has come to stay. 
Mind you, these artificially built up things, 
these things that can't maintain themselves in 
the market without monopoly, have come to 
stay, and the only thing that the government 
can do, the only thing that the third party pro- 
poses should be done, is to set up a commission 
to regulate them. It accepts them. It says: 
" We will not undertake, it were futile to under- 
take, to prevent monopoly, but we will go into 
an arrangement by which we will make these 
monopolies kind to you. We will guarantee 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 197 

that they shall be pitiful. We will guarantee 
that they shall pay the right wages. We will 
guarantee that they shall do everything kind 
and public-spirited, which they have never 
heretofore shown the least inclination to do." 

Don't you realize that that is a blind alley? 
You can't find your way to liberty that way. 
You can't find your way to social reform through 
the forces that have made social reform neces- 
sary. 

The fundamental part of such a program is 
that the trusts shall be recognized as a per- 
manent part of our economic order, and that 
the government shall try to make trusts the 
ministers, the instruments, through which the 
life of this country shall be justly and hap- 
pily developed on its industrial side. Now, 
everything that touches our lives sooner" 6r 
later goes back to the industries which 
sustain our lives. I have often reflected 
that there is a very human order in the 
petitions in our Lord's prayer. For we pray 
first of all, "Give us this day our daily bread," 
knowing that it is useless to pray for spiritual 



198 THE NEW FREEDOM 

graces on an empty stomach, and that the 
amount of wages we get, the kind of clothes we 
wear, the kind of food we can afford to buy, is 
fundamental to everything else. 

Those who administer our physical life, there- 
fore, administer our spiritual life; and if we are 
going to carry out the fine purpose of that great 
chorus which supporters of the third party sang 
almost with religious fervor, then we have got to 
find out through whom these purposes of 
humanity are going to be realized. It is a mere 
enterprise, so far as that part of it is concerned, 
of making the monopolies philanthropic. 

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. 
I do not want to be taken care of by the govern- 
ment, either directly, or by any instruments 
through which the government is acting. I 
want only to have right and justice prevail, so 
far as I am concerned. Give me right and jus- 
tice and I will undertake to take care of myself. 
If you enthrone the trusts as the means of the 
development of this country under the super- 
vison of the government, then I shall pray the 
old Spanish proverb, "God save me from my 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 199 

friends, and I'll take care of my enemies." 
Because I want to be saved from these friends. 
Observe that I say these friends, for I am ready 
to admit that a great many men who believe 
that the development of industry in this country 
through monopolies is inevitable intend to be 
the friends of the people. Though they pro- 
fess to be my friends, they are undertaking a way 
of friendship which renders it impossible that 
they should do me the fundamental service that 
I demand — namely, that I should be free and 
should have the same opportunities that every- 
body else has. 

For I understand it to be the fundamental 
proposition of American liberty that we do not 
desire special privilege, because we know special 
privilege will never comprehend the general 
welfare. This is the fundamental, spiritual dif- 
ference between adherents of the party now 
about to take charge of the government and 
those who have been in charge of it in recent 
years. They are so indoctrinated with the 
idea that only the big business interests of this 
country understand the United States and can 



200 THE NEW FREEDOM 

make it prosperous that they cannot divorce^ 
their thoughts from that obsession. They have 
put the government into the hands of trustees, 
and Mr. Taft and Mr. Roosevelt were the 
rival candidates to preside over the board of 
trustees. They were candidates to serve the 
people, no doubt, to the best of their ability, 
but it was not their idea to serve them directly; 
they proposed to serve them indirectly through 
the enormous forces already set up, which are 
so great that there is almost an open question 
whether the government of the United States 
with the people back of it is strong enough to 
overcome and rule them. 

Shall we try to get the grip of monopoly 
away from our lives, or shall we not? Shall we 
withhold our hand and say monopoly is inevi- 
table, that all that we can do is to regulate it? 
Shall we say that all that we can do is to put 
government in competition with monopoly and 
try its strength against it? Shall we admit that 
the creature of our own hands is stronger than 
we are? We have been dreading all along the 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 201 

time when the combined power of high finance 
would be greater than the power of the govern- 
ment. Have we come to a time when the Pres- 
ident of the United States or any man who 
wishes to be the President must doff his cap in 
the presence of this high finance, and say, *' You 
are our inevitable master, but we will see how 
we can make the best of it? " 

We are at the parting of the ways. We have, 
not one or two or three, but many, established 
and formidable monopolies in the United States. 
We have, not one or two, but many, fields of 
endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impos- 
sible, for the independent man to enter. We 
have restricted credit, we have restricted oppor- 
tunity, we have controlled development, and 
we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of 
the most completely controlled and dominated, 
governments in the civilized world — no longer 
a government by free opinion, no longer a 
government by conviction and the vote of the 
majority, but a government by the opinion and 
the duress of small groups of dominant men. 

If the government is to tell big business men 



202 THE NEW FREEDOM 

how to run their business, then don't you see 
that big business men have to get closer to the 
government even than they are now? Don't 
you see that they must capture the government, 
in order not to be restrained too much by it? 
Must capture the government? They have 
already captured it. Are you going to invite 
those inside to stay inside? They don't have 
to get there. They are there. Are you going 
to own your own premises, or are you not? 
That is your choice. Are you going to say: 
"You didn't get into the house the right way, 
but you are in there, God bless you; we will 
stand out here in the cold and you can hand us 
J out something once in a while?" 

At the least, under the plan I am opposing, 
there will be an avowed partnership between 
the government and the trusts. I take it that 
the firm will be ostensibly controlled by the senior 
member. For I take it that the government 
of the United States is at least the senior member, 
though the younger member has all along been 
running the business. But when all the mo- 
mentum, when all the energy, when a great 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 203 

deal of the genius, as so often happens in part- 
nerships the world over, is with the junior part- 
ner, I don't think that the superintendence of 
the senior partner is going to amount to very 
much. And I don't believe that benevolence 
can be read into the hearts of the trusts by the 
superintendence and suggestions of the federal 
government; because the government has never 
within my recollection had its suggestions ac- 
cepted by the trusts. On the contrary, the 
suggestions of the trusts have been accepted 
by the government. 

There is no hope to be seen for the people of 
the United States until the partnership is dis- 
solved. And the business of the party now en- 
trusted with power is going to be to dissolve it. 

Those who supported the third party sup- 
ported, I believe, a program perfectly agreeable 
to the monopolies. How those who have been 
fighting monopoly through all their career can 
reconcile the continuation of the battle under 
the banner of the very men they have been 
fighting, I cannot imagine. I challenge the 



204 THE NEW FREEDOM, 

program in its fundamejitals as not ^a pro- 
gressive program at all.(£vWhy did Mr. Gary 
suggest this very method when he was at the 
head of the Steel Trust? Why is this very 
method commended here, there, and everywhere 
by the men who are interested in the main- 
tenance of the present economic system of the 
United States? Why do the men who do not 
wish to be disturbed urge the adoption of 
this program? The rest of the program is 
very handsome; there is beating in it a great 
pulse of sympathy for the human race. But 
I do not want the sympathy of the trusts for 
the human race. I do not want their con- 
descending assistance. 

And I warn every progressive Republican 
that by lending his assistance to this program 
he is playing false to the very cause in which he 
had enlisted. That cause was a battle against 
monopoly, against control, against the concen- 
tration of power in our economic development, 
against all those things that interfere with abso- 
lutely free enterprise. I believe that some 
day these gentlemen will wake up and realize 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 205 

that they have misplaced their trust, not in an 
individual, it may be, but in a program which 
is fatal to the things we hold dearest. 

If there is any meaning in the things I have 
been urging, it is this: that the incubus that lies 
upon this country is the present monopolistic 
organization of our industrial life. That is the 
thing which certain Republicans became "in- 
surgents" in order to throw off. And yet some 
of £hem allowed themselves to be so misled as to 
go into the camp of the third party in order to 
remove what the third party proposed to legalize. 
My point is that this is a method conceived 
from the point of view of the very men who are 
to be controlled, and that this is just the wrong 
point of view from which to conceive it. 

I said not long ago that Mr. Roosevelt was 
promoting a plan for the control of monopoly 
which was supported by the United States Steel 
Corporation. Mr. Roosevelt denied that he 
was being supported by more than one member 
of that corporation. He was thinking of money. 
I was thinking of ideas. I did not say that he 
was getting money from these gentlemen; it 



206 THE NEW FREEDOM 

was a matter of indifference to me where he got 
his money; but it was a matter of a great deal of 
difference to me where he got his ideas. He got 
his idea with regard to the regulation of mo- 
nopoly from the gentlemen who form the United 
States Steel Corporation. I am perfectly ready 
to admit that the gentlemen who control the 
United States Steel Corporation have a perfect 
right to entertain their own ideas about this 
and to urge them upon the people of the United 
States; but I want to say that their ideas are 
not my ideas; and I am perfectly certain that 
they would not promote any idea which inter- 
fered with their monopoly. Inasmuch, there- 
fore, as I hope and intend to interfere with mo- 
nopoly just as much as possible, I cannot sub- 
scribe to arrangements by which they know that 
it will not be disturbed. 

The Roosevelt plan is that there shall be an 
industrial commission charged with the super- 
vision of the great monopolistic combinations 
which have been formed under the protection 
of the tariff, and that the government of the 
United States shall see to it that these gentle- 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 207 

men who have conquered labor shall be kind to 
labor. I find, then, the proposition to be this: 
That there shall be two masters, the great cor- 
poration, and over it the government of the 
United States; and I ask who is going to be 
master of the government of the United States? 
It has a master now, — those who in combina- 
tion control these monopolies. And if the 
government controlled by the monopolies in its 
turn controls the monopolies, the partnership is 
finally consummated. 

I don't care how benevolent the master is 
going to be, I will not live under a master. 
That is not what America was created for. 
America was created in order that every man 
should have the saiyie chance as every other man 
to exercise mastery over his own fortunes. 
What I want to do is analogous to what the 
authorities of the city of Glasgow did with 
tenement houses. I want to light and patrol 
the corridors of these great organizations in 
order to see that nobody who tries to traverse 
them is waylaid and maltreated. If you will 
but hold off the adversaries, if you will but see 



208 THE NEW FREEDOM 

to it that the weak are protected, I will venture 
a wager with you that there are some men in 
the United States, now weak, economically weak, 
who have brains enough to compete with these 
gentlemen and who will presently come into the 
market and put these gentlemen on their 
mettle. And the minute they come into the 
market there will be a bigger market for labor 
and a different wage scale for labor. 

Because it is susceptible of convincing proof 
that the high-paid labor of America, — where 
it is high paid, — is cheaper than the low-paid 
labor of the continent of Europe. Do you know 
that about ninety per cent, of those who are 
employed in labor in this country are not em- 
ployed in the "protected" industries, and that 
their wages are almost without exception higher 
than the wages of those who are employed in 
the "protected" industries .f* There is no corner 
on carpenters, there is no corner on bricklayers, 
there is no corner on scores of individual classes 
of skilled laborers; but there is a corner on the 
poolers in the furnaces, there is a corner on the 
men who dive down into the mines; they are in 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 209 

the grip of a controlling power which deter- 
mines the market rates of wages in the United 
States. Only where labor is free is labor highly- 
paid in America. 

When I am fighting monopolistic control, 
therefore, I am fighting for the liberty of every 
man in America, and I am fighting for the 
liberty of American industry. 

It is significant that the spokesman for the 
plan of adopting monopoly declares his de- 
voted adherence to the principle of "protec- 
tion." Only those duties which are manifestly 
too high even to serve the interests of those who 
are directly "protected" ought in his view to be 
lowered. He declares that he is not troubled 
by the fact that a very large amount of money is 
taken out of the pocket of the general taxpayer 
and put into the pocket of particular classes of 
"protected" manufacturers, but that his con- 
cern is that so little of this money gets into the 
pocket of the laboring man and so large a pro- 
portion of it into the pockets of the employers. 
I have searched his program very thoroughly 
for an indication of what he expects to do in 



210 THE NEW FREEDOM 

order to see to it that a larger proportion of this 
"prize" money gets into the pay envelope, and 
have found none. Mr. Roosevelt, in one of his 
speeches, proposed that manufacturers who 
did not share their profits liberally enough with 
their workmen should be penalized by a sharp 
cut in the "protection" afforded them; but the 
platform, so far as I could see, proposed nothing. 
Moreover, under the system proposed, most 
employers, — at any rate, practically all of the 
most powerful of them, — would be, to all 
intents and purposes, wards and proteges of 
the government which is the master of us all; 
for no part of this program can be discussed 
intelligently without^ remembering that mo- 
nopoly, as handled by it, is not to be prevented, 
but accepted. It is to be accepted and regu- 
lated. All attempt to resist it is to be given up. 
It is to be accepted as inevitable. The govern- 
ment is to set up a commission whose duty it will 
be, not to check or defeat it, but merely to 
regulate it under rules which it is itself to frame 
and develop. So that the chief employers will 
have this tremendous authority behind them: 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 211 

what they do, they will have the license of the 
federal government to do. 

And it is worth the while of the workingmen 
of the country to recall what the attitude toward 
organized labor has been of these masters of con- 
solidated industries whom it is proposed that 
the federal government should take under its pa- 
tronage as well as under its control. They have 
been the stoutest and most successful opponents 
of organized labor, and they have tried to under- 
mine it in a great many ways. Some of the 
ways they have adopted have worn the guise of 
philanthropy and good-will, and have no doubt 
been used, for all I know, in perfect good faith. 
Here and there they have set up systems of 
profit sharing, of compensation for injuries, and 
of bonuses, and even pensions; but every one of 
these plans has merely bound their workingmen 
more tightly to themselves. Rights under these 
various arrangements are not legal rights. They 
are merely privileges which employees enjoy 
only so long as they remain in the employment 
and observe the rules of the great industries for 
which they work. If they refuse to be weaned 



212 THE NEW FREEDOM 

away from their independence they cannot con- 
tinue to enjoy the benefits extended to them. 

When you have thought the whole thing out, 
therefore, you will find that the program of 
the new party legalizes monopolies and sys- 
tematically subordinates workingmen to them 
and to plans made by the government both with 
regard to employment and with regard to wages. 
Take the thing as a whole, and it looks strangely 
like economic mastery over the very lives and 
fortunes of those who do the daily work of the 
nation; and all this under the overwhelming 
power and sovereignty of the national govern- 
ment. What most of us are fighting for is to 
break up this very partnership between big 
business and the government. We call upon 
all intelligent men to bear witness that if this 
plan were consummated, the great employers 
and capitalists of the country would be under a 
more overpowering temptation than ever to 
take control of the government and keep it sub- 
servient to their purpose. 

What a prize it would be to capture! How 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 213 

unassailable would be the majesty and the 
tyranny of monopoly if it could thus get sanc- 
tion of law and the authority of government! 
By what means, except open revolt, could we 
ever break the crust of our hfe again and become 
free men, breathing an air of our own, living 
lives that we wrought out for ourselves? 

You cannot use monopoly in order to serve 
a free people. You cannot use great combina- 
tions of capital to be pitiful and righteous when 
the consciences of great bodies of men are en- 
listed, not in the promotion of special privilege, 
but in the realization of human rights. When I 
read those beautiful portions of the program 
of the third party devoted to the uplift of 
mankind and see noble men and women attach- 
ing themselves to that party in the hope that 
regulated monopoly may realize these dreams 
of humanity, I wonder whether they have 
really studied the instruments through which 
they are going to do these things. The man 
who is leading the third party has not changed 
his point of view since he was President of the 
United States. I am not asking him to change 



214 THE NEW FREEDOM 

it. I am not saying that he has not a perfect 
right to retain it. But I do say that it is not 
surprising that a man who had the point of view 
with regard to the government of "this country 
which he had when he was President was not 
chosen as President again, and allowed to patent 
the present processes of industry and personally 
direct them how to treat the people of the United 
States. 

There has been a history of the human race, 
you know, and a history of government; it is 
recorded; and the kind of thing proposed has 
been tried again and again and has always led 
to the same result. History is strewn all along 
its course with the wrecks of governments that 
tried to be humane, tried to carry out humane 
programs through the instrumentality of those 
who controlled the material fortunes of the rest 
of their fellow-citizens. 

I do not trust any promises of a change of 
temper on the part of monopoly. Monopoly 
never was conceived in the temper of tolerance. 
Monopoly never was conceived with the purpose 
of general development. It was conceived 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 215 

with the purpose of special advantage. Has 
monopoly been very benevolent to its em- 
ployees? Have the trusts had a soft heart for 
the working people of America? Have you 
found trusts that cared whether women were 
sapped of their vitality or not? Have you 
found trusts who are very scrupulous about 
using children in their tender years? Have you 
found trusts that were keen to protect the lungs 
and the health and the freedom of their em- 
ployees? Have you found trusts that thought 
as much of their men as they did of their 
machinery? Then who is going to convert 
these men into the chief instruments of justice 
and benevolence? 

If you will point me to the least promise of 
disinterestedness on the part of the masters of 
our lives, then I will conceive you some ray of 
hope; but only upon this hypothesis, only upon 
this conjecture: that the history of the world is 
going to be reversed, and that the men who 
have the power to oppress us will be kind to us, 
and will promote our interests, whether our 
interests jump with theirs or not. 



216 THE NEW FREEDOM 

After you have made the partnership be- 
tween monopoly and your government per- 
manent, then I invite all the philanthropists in 
the United States to come and sit on the stage 
and go through the motions of finding out how 
they are going to get philanthropy out of their 
masters. 

I do not want to see the special interests of 
the United States take care of the workingmen, 
women, and children. I want to see justice, 
righteousness, fairness and humanity displayed 
in all the laws of the United States, and I do 
not want any power to intervene between the 
people and their government. Justice is what 
we want, not patronage and condescension and 
pitiful helpfulness. The trusts are our masters 
now, but I for one do not care to live in a 
country called free even under kind masters. 
I prefer to live under no masters at all. 

I agree that as a nation we are now about to 
undertake what may be regarded as the most 
difficult part of our governmental enterprises. 
We have gone along so far without very much 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 217 

assistance from our government. We have felt, 
and felt more and more in recent months, that 
the American people were at a certain disad- 
vantage as compared with the people of other 
countries, because of what the governments of 
other countries were doing for them and our 
government omitting to do for us. 

It is perfectly clear to every man who has 
any vision of the immediate future, who can 
forecast any part of it from the indications of the 
present, that we are just upon the threshold of a 
time when the systematic life of this country 
will be sustained, or at least supplemented, at 
every point by governmental activity. And 
we have now to determine what kind of govern- 
mental activity it shall be; whether, in the first 
place, it shall be direct from the government 
itself, or whether it shall be indirect, through in- 
strumentalities which have already constituted 
themselves and which stand ready to super- 
sede the government, f 

I believe that the time has come when the 
governments of this country, both state and 
national, have to set the stage, and set it very 



218 THE NEW FREEDOM 

minutely and carefully, for the doing of justice 
to men in every relationship of life. It has been 
free and easy with us so far; it has been go as 
you please; it has been every man look out for 
himself; and we have continued to assume, up 
to this year when every man is dealing, not with 
another man, in most cases, but with a body of 
men whom he has not seen, that the relation- 
ships of property are the same that they always 
were. We have great tasks before us, and we 
must enter on them as befits men charged with 
the responsibility of shaping a new era. 

We have a great program of governmental 
assistance ahead of us in the co-operative life of 
the nation; but we dare not enter upon that 
program until we have freed the govern- 
ment. That is the point. Benevolence never 
developed a man or a nation. We do not want 
a benevolent government. AVe want a free and 
a just government. Every one of the great 
schemes of social uplift which are now so much 
debated by noble people amongst us is based, 
when rightly conceived, upon justice, not upon 
benevolence. It is based upon the right of 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 219 

men to breathe pure air, to live; upon the right 
of women to bear children, and not to be over- 
burdened so that disease and breakdown will 
come upon them; upon the right of children to 
thrive and grow up and be strong; upon all 
these fundamental things which appeal, indeed, 
to our hearts, but which our minds perceive to 
be part of the fundamental justice of life. 

Politics differs from philanthropy in this: 
that in philanthropy we sometimes do things 
through pity merely, while in politics we act 
always, if we are righteous men, on grounds of 
justice and large expediency for men in the mass. 
Sometimes in our pitiful sympathy with our 
fellow-men we must do things that are more 
than just. We must forgive men. We must 
help men who have gone wrong. We must 
sometimes help men who have gone criminally 
wrong. But the law does not forgive. It is its 
duty to equalize conditions, to make the path 
of right the path of safety and advantage, to see 
that every man has a fair chance to hve and to 
serve himself, to see that injustice and wrong 
are not wrought upon any. 



220 THE NEW FREEDOM 

We ought not to permit passion to enter into 
our thoughts or our hearts in this great matter; 
we ought not to allow ourselves to be governed 
by resentment or any kind of evilfeehng, but we 
ought, nevertheless, to reahze the seriousness of 
our situation. That seriousness consists, singu- 
larly enough, not in the malevolence of the men 
who preside over our industrial life, but in their 
genius and in their honest thinking. These 
men believe that the prosperity of the United 
States is not safe unless it is in their keeping. If 
they were dishonest, we might put them out of 
business by law; since most of them are honest, 
we can put them out of business only by making 
it impossible for them to realize their genuine 
convictions. I am not afraid of a knave. I am 
not afraid of a rascal. I am afraid of a strong 
man who is wrong, and whose wrong thinking 
can be impressed upon other persons by his 
own force of character and force of speech. If 
God had only arranged it that all the men who 
are wrong were rascals, we could put them out 
of business very easily, because they would give 
themselves away sooner or later; but God has 



BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE? 221 

made our task heavier than that, — he has 
made some good men who think wrong. We 
cannot fight them because they are bad, but 
because they are wrong. We must overcome 
them by a better force, the genial, the splendid, 
the permanent force of a better reason. 

The reason that America was set up was that 
she might be different from all the nations of 
the world in this: that the strong could not put 
the weak to the wall, that the strong could not 
prevent the weak from entering the race. 
America stands for opportunity. America 
stands for a free field and no favor. America 
stands for a government responsive to the 
interests of all. And until America recovers 
those ideals in practice, she will not have the 
right to hold her head high again amidst the 
nations as she used to hold it. 

It is like coming out of a stifling cellar into 
the open where we can breathe again and see 
the free spaces of the heavens to turn away from 
such a doleful program of submission and 
dependence toward the other plan, the confi- 



222 THE NEW FREEDOM 

dent purpose for which the people have given 
their mandate. Our purpose is the restoration 
of freedom. We purpose to prevent private 
monopoly by law, to see to it that the methods 
by which monopolies have been built up are 
legally made impossible. We design that the 
limitations on private enterprise shall be re- 
moved, so that the next generation of young- 
sters, as they come along, will not have to be- 
come proteges of benevolent trusts, but will be 
free to go about making their own lives what 
they will; so that we shall taste again the full 
cup, not of charity, but of liberty, — the only 
wine that ever refreshed and renewed the spirit 
of a people. 



X 

THE WAY TO RESUME IS TO RESUME 

ONE of the wonderful things about Amer- 
ica, to my mind, is this: that for more 
than a generation it has allowed itself 
to be governed by persons who were not invited 
to govern it. A singular thing about the people 
of the United States is their almost infinite 
patience, their willingness to stand quietly by 
and see things done which they have voted 
against and do not want done, and yet never 
lay the hand of disorder upon any arrangement 
of government. 

There is hardly a part of the United States 
where men are not aware that secret private 
purposes and interests have been running the 
government. They have been running it 
through the agency of those interesting persons 
whom we call political "bosses." A boss is not 
so much a politician as the business agent 

223 



224 THE NEW FREEDOM 

in politics of the special interests. The boss 
is not a partisan; he is quite above politics! 
He has an understanding with the boss of the 
other party, so that, whether it is heads or 
tails, we lose. The two receive contributions 
from the same sources, and they spend those 
contributions for the same purposes. 

Bosses are men who have worked their way 
by secret methods to the place of power they 
occupy; men who were never elected to any- 
thing; men who were not asked by the people 
to conduct their government, and who are very 
much more powerful than if you had asked 
them, so long as you leave them where they are, 
behind closed doors, in secret conference. They 
are not politicians; they have no policies, — 
except concealed policies of private aggrandize- 
ment. A boss isn't a leader of a party. Parties 
do not meet in back rooms; parties do not 
make arrangements which do not get into the 
newspapers. Parties, if you reckon them by 
voting strength, are great masses of men who, 
because they can't vote any other ticket, vote 
the ticket that was prepared for them by the 



THE WAY TO RESUME 225 

aforesaid arrangement in the aforesaid back 
room in accordance with the aforesaid under- 
standing. A boss is the manipulator of a 
"machine." A "machine" is that part of a 
poHtical organization which has been taken out 
of the hands of the rank and file of the party, 
captured by half a dozen men. It is the part 
that has ceased to be political and has become 
an agency for the purposes of unscrupulous 
business. 

Do not lay up the sins of this kind of busi- 
ness to political organizations. Organization is 
legitimate, is necessary, is even distinguished, 
when it lends itself to the carrying out of great 
causes. Only the man who uses organization 
to promote private purposes is a boss. Always 
distinguish between a political leader and a 
boss. I honor the man who makes the organ- 
ization of a great party strong and thorough, 
in order to use it for public service. But he 
is not a boss. A boss is a man who uses this 
splendid, open force for secret purposes. 

One of the worst features of the boss system 
is this fact, that it works secretly. I would 



226 THE NEW FREEDOM 

a great deal rather live under a king whom I 
should at least know, than under a boss whom I 
don't know. A boss is a much more formidable 
master than a king, because a king is an obvious 
master, whereas the hands of the boss are 
always where you least expect them to be. 

When I was in Oregon, not many months 
ago, I had some very interesting conversations 
with Mr. U'Ren, who is the father of what is 
called the Oregon System, a system by which 
he has put bosses out of business. He is a 
member of a group of public-spirited men who, 
whenever they cannot get what they want 
through the legislature, draw up a bill and 
submit it to the people, by means of the initia- 
tive, and generally get what they want. The 
day I arrived in Portland, a morning paper 
happened to say, very ironically, that there 
were two legislatures in Oregon, one at Salem, 
the state capital, and the other going around 
under the hat of Mr. U'Ren. I could not 
resist the temptation of saying, when I spoke 
that evening, that, while I was the last man to 
suggest that power should be concentrated in 



THE WAY TO RESUME 227 

any single individual or group of individuals, 
I would, nevertheless, after my experience in 
New Jersey, rather have a legislature that went 
around under the hat of somebody in particular 
whom I knew I could find than a legislature 
that went around under God knows who's hat; 
because then you could at least put your finger 
on your governing force ; you would know where 
to find it. 

Why do we continue to permit these things? 
Isn't it about time that we grew up and took 
charge of our own affairs? I am tired of being 
under age in politics. I don't want to be 
associated with anybody except those who are 
politically over twenty-one. I don't wish to 
sit down and let any man take care of me without 
my having at least a voice in it; and if he doesn't 
listen to my advice, I am going to make it as 
unpleasant for him as I can. Not because my 
advice is necessarily good, but because no govern- 
ment is good in which every man doesn't insist 
upon his advice being heard, at least, whether 
it is heeded or not. 

Some persons have said that representative 



228 THE NEW FREEDOM 

government has proved too indirect and clumsy 
an instrument, and has broken down as a 
means of popular control. Others, looking 
a little deeper, have said that it was not repre- 
sentative government that had broken down, 
but the effort to get it. They have pointed 
out that, with our present methods of machine 
nomination and our present methods of election, 
which give us nothing more than a choice be- 
tween one set of machine nominees and another, 
we do not get representative government at 
all, — at least not government representative 
of the people, but merely government repre- 
sentative of political managers who serve their 
own interests and the interests of those with 
whom they find it profitable to establish part- 
nerships. 

Obviously, this is something that goes to the 
root of the whole matter. Back of all reform 
lies the method of getting it. Back of the ques- 
tion, What do you want, lies the question, — 
the fundamental question of all government, — 
How are you going to get it? How are you 
going to get public servants who will obtain 



THE WAY TO RESUME 229 

it for you? How are you going to get genuine 
representatives who will serve your interests, 
and not their own or the interests of some 
special group or body of your fellow-citizens 
whose power is of the few and not of the many? 
These are the queries which have drawn the 
attention of the whole country to the subject 
of the direct primary, the direct choice of their 
officials by the people, without the intervention 
of the nominating machine; to the subject of 
the direct election of United States Senators; 
and to the question of the initiative, referendum, 
and recall. 

The critical moment in the choosing of officials 
is that of their nomination more often than that 
of their election. When two party organiza- 
tions, nominally opposing each other but actu- 
ally working in perfect understanding and co- 
operation, see to it that both tickets have the 
same kind of men on them, it is Tweedledum 
or Tweedledee, so far as the people are con- 
cerned; the political managers have us coming 
and going. We may delude ourselves with 



230 THE NEW FREEDOM 

the pleasing belief that we are electing our own 
ofl&cials, but of course the fact is we are merely 
making an indifferent and ineffectual choice 
between two sets of men named by interests 
which are not ours. 

So that what we establish the direct primary 
for is this: to break up the inside and selfish 
determination of the question who shall be 
elected to conduct the government and 
make the laws of our commonwealths and 
our nation. Everywhere the impression is 
growing stronger that there can be no 
means of dominating those who have domi- 
nated us except by taking this process of the 
original selection of nominees into our own 
hands. Does that upset any ancient foun- 
dations? Is it not the most natural and simple 
thing in the world? You say that it does not 
always work; that the people are too busy 
or too lazy to bother about voting at primary 
elections? True, sometimes the people of a 
state or a community do let a direct primary go 
by without asserting their authority as against 
the bosses. The electorate of the United States 



THE WAY TO RESUME 231 

is occasionally like the god Baal: it is some- 
times on a journey or it is sometimes 
asleep; but when it does awake, it does 
not resemble the god Baal in the slight- 
est degree. It is a great self-possessed 
power which effectually takes control of its 
own affairs. I am willing to wait. I am 
among those who believe so firmly in the essen- 
tial doctrines of democracy th^t I am willing 
to wait on the convenience of this great sover- 
eign, provided I know that he has got the 
instrument to dominate whenever he chooses 
to grasp it. 

Then there is another thing that the conser- 
vative people are concerned about: the direct 
election of United States Senators. I have 
seen some thoughtful men discuss that with 
a sort of shiver, as if to disturb the original 
constitution of the United States Senate was 
to do something touched with impiety, touched 
with irreverence for the Constitution itself. 
But the first thing necessary to reverence for 
the United States Senate is respect for United 
States Senators. I am not one of those who 



232 THE NEW FREEDOM 

condemn the United States Senate as a body; 
for, no matter what has happened there, no 
matter how questionable the practices or how 
corrupt the influences which have filled some 
of the seats in that high body, it must in fairness 
be said that the majority in it has all the years 
through been untouched by stain, and that 
there has always been there a sufficient number 
of men of integrity to vindicate the self-respect 
and the hopefulness of America with regard to 
her institutions. 

But you need not be told, and it would be 
painful to repeat to you, how seats have been 
bought in the Senate; and you know that a 
little group of Senators holding the balance 
of power has again and again been able to 
defeat programs of reform upon which the 
whole country had set its heart; and that when- 
ever you analyzed the power that was behind 
those little groups you have found that it was not 
the power of public opinion, but some private 
influence, hardly to be discerned by superficial 
scrutiny, that had put those men there to do 
that thing. 



THE WAY TO RESUME 233 

Now, returning to the original principles 
upon which we profess to stand, have the 
people of the United States not the right to see 
to it that every seat in the Senate represents 
the unbought United States of America? Does 
the direct election of Senators touch anything 
except the private control of seats in the Senate? 
We remember another thing: that we have not 
been without our suspicions concerning some 
of the legislatures which elect Senators. Some 
of the suspicions which we entertained in 
New Jersey about them turned out to be 
founded upon very solid facts indeed. Until two 
years ago New Jersey had not in half a gener- 
ation been represented in the United States 
Senate by the men who would have been chosen 
if the process of selecting them had been free 
and based upon the popular will. 

We are not to deceive ourselves by putting 
our heads into the sand and saying, "Every- 
thing is all right." Mr. Gladstone declared that 
the American Constitution was the most perfect 
instrument ever devised by the brain of man. 
We have been praised all over the world for our 



234 THE NEW FREEDOM 

singular genius for setting up successful institu- 
tions, but a very thoughtful Englishman, and 
a very witty one, said a very instructive thing 
about that: he said that to show that the 
American Constitution had worked well was no 
proof that it is an excellent constitution, because 
Americans could run any constitution, — a com- 
pliment which we laid like sweet unction to our 
soul; and yet a criticism which ought to set us 
thinking. 

While it is true that when American forces 
are awake they can conduct American processes 
without serious departure from the ideals of 
the Constitution, it is nevertheless true that we 
have had many shameful instances of practices 
which we can absolutely remove by the direct 
election of Senators by the people themselves. 
And therefore I, for one, will not allow any 
man who knows his history to say to me that 
I am acting inconsistently with either the spirit 
or the essential form of the American govern- 
ment in advocating the direct election of United 
States Senators. 

Take another matter. Take the matter of 



THE WAY TO RESUME 235 

the initiative and referendum, and the recall. 
There are communities, there are states in the 
Union, in which I am quite ready to admit that 
it is perhaps premature, that perhaps it will 
never be necessary, to discuss these measures. 
But I want to call your attention to the fact 
that they have been adopted to the general 
satisfaction in a number of states where the 
electorate had become convinced that they did 
not have representative government. 

Why do you suppose that in the United 
States, the place in all the world where the 
people were invited to control their own govern- 
ment, we should set up such an agitation as 
that for the initiative and referendum and the 
recall. When did this thing begin? I have 
been receiving circulars and documents from 
little societies of men all over the United 
States with regard to these matters, for the 
last twenty-five years. But the circulars for 
a long time kindled no fire. Men felt that 
they had representative government and they 
were content. But about ten or fifteen years 
ago the fire began to burn, — and it has been 



236 THE NEW FREEDOM 

sweeping over wider and wider areas of the 
country, because of the growing consciousness 
that something intervenes between the people 
and the government, and that there must be 
some arm direct enough and strong enough to 
thrust aside the something that comes in the 
way. 

I beUeve that we are upon the eve of recover- 
ing some of the most important prerogatives 
of a free people, and that the initiative and 
referendum are playing a great part in that 
recovery. I met a man the other day who 
thought that the referendum was some kind 
of an animal, because it had a Latin name; 
and there are still people in this country who 
have to have it explained to them. But most 
of us know and are deeply interested. Why.f* 
Because we have felt that in too many instances 
our government did not represent us, and we 
have said: *'We have got to have a key to 
the door of our own house. The initiative and 
referendum and the recall afford such a key to 
our own premises. If the people inside the 
house will run the place as we want it run, they 



THE WAY TO RESUME 237 

may stay inside and we will keep the latchkeys 
in our pockets. If they do not, we shall have 
to re-enter upon possession." 

Let no man be deceived by the cry that 
somebody is proposing to substitute direct 
legislation by the people, or the direct reference 
of laws passed in the legislature, to the vote of 
the people, for representative government. The 
advocates of these reforms have always declared, 
and declared in unmistakable terms, that they 
were intending to recover representative govern- 
emnt, not supersede it; that the initiative and 
referendum would find no use in places where 
legislatures were really representative of the 
people whom they were elected to serve. The 
initiative is a means of seeing to it that measures 
which the people want shall be passed, — when 
legislatures defy or ignore public opinion. The 
referendum is a means of seeing to it that the 
unrepresentative measures which they do not 
want shall not be placed upon the statute book. 

When you come to the recall, the principle 
is that if an administrative officer, — for we 
will begin with the administrative officer, — 



238 THE NEW FREEDOM 

is corrupt or so unwise as to be doing things 
that are likely to lead to all sorts of mischief, 
it will be possible by a deliberate process pre- 
scribed by the law to get rid of that officer before 
the end of his term. You must admit that it is 
a little inconvenient sometimes to have what 
has been called an astronomical system of 
government, in which you can't change anything 
until there has been a certain number of revolu- 
tions of the seasons. In many of our oldest 
states the ordinary administrative term is a 
single year. The people of those states have 
not been willing to trust an official out of their 
sight more than twelve months. Elections 
there are a sort of continuous performance, 
based on the idea of the constant touch of the 
hand of the people on their own affairs. That 
is exactly the principle of the recall. I don't 
see how any man grounded in the traditions 
of American affairs can find any valid objection 
to the recall of administrative officers. The 
meaning of the recall is merely this, — not that 
we should have unstable government, not that 
officials should not know how long their power 



THE WAY TO RESUME 239 

might last, — but that we might have govern- 
ment exercised by officials who know whence 
their power came and that if they yield to 
private influences they will presently be dis- 
placed by public influences. 

You will of course understand that, both 
in the case of the initiative and referendum 
and in that of the recall, the very existence 
of these powers, the very possibilities which 
they imply, are half, — indeed, much more than 
half, — the battle. They rarely need to be 
actually exercised. The fact that the people 
may initiate keeps the members of the legis- • 
lature awake to the necessity of initiating 
themselves; the fact that the people have the 
right to demand the submission of a legislative 
measure to popular vote renders the members 
of the legislature wary of bills that would not 
pass the people; the very possibility of being 
recalled puts the official on his best behavior. 

It is another matter when we come to the 
judiciary. I myself have never been in favor 
of the recall of judges. Not because some 
judges have not deserved to be recalled. That 



240 THE NEW FREEDOM 

isn't the point. The point is that the recall 
of judges is treating the symptom instead of 
the disease. The disease lies deeper, and some- 
times it is very virulent and very dangerous. 
There have been courts in the United States 
which were controlled by private interests. 
There have been supreme courts in our states 
before which plain men could not get justice. 
There have been corrupt judges; ther,e have 
been controlled judges; there have been judges 
who acted as other men's servants and not as 
the servants of the public. x\h, there are some 
shameful chapters in the story! The judicial 
process is the ultimate safeguard of the things 
that we must hold stable in this country. But 
suppose that that safeguard is corrupted; sup- 
pose that it does not guard my interests and 
yours, but guards merely the interests of 
a very small group of individuals; and, when- 
ever your interest clashes with theirs, yours 
will have to give way, though you represent 
ninety per cent, of the citizens, and they 
only ten per cent. Then where is your safe- 
guard? 



THE WAY TO RESUME 241 

The just thought of the people must con- 
trol the judiciaiy, as it controls every other 
instrument of government. But there are ways 
and ways of controlling it. If, — mark you, 
I say if, — at one time the Southern Pacific 
Railroad owned the supreme court of the State 
of California, would you remedy that situation 
by recalling the judges of the court? What 
good would that do, so long as the Southern 
Pacific Railroad could substitute others for 
them? You would not be cutting deep enough. 
Where you want to go is to the process by 
which those judges were selected. And when 
you get there, you will reach the moral of the 
whole of this discussion, because the moral 
of it all is that the people of the United States 
have suspected, until their suspicions have 
been justified by all sorts of substantial and 
unanswerable evidence, that, in place after 
place, at turning-points in the history of this 
country, we have been controlled by private 
understandings and not by the public interest; 
and that influences which were improper, if not 
corrupt, have determined everything from the 



242 THE NEW FREEDOM 

making of laws to the administration of justice. 
The disease Hes in the region where these men 
get their nominations; and if you can recover 
for the people the selecting of judges, you will 
not have to trouble about their recall. Selec- 
tion is of more radical consequence than election. 

I am aware that those who advocate these 
measures which we have been discussing are 
denounced as dangerous radicals. I am particu- 
larly interested to observe that the men who 
cry out most loudly against what they call 
radicalism are the men who find that their 
private game in politics is being spoiled. Who 
are the arch-conservatives nowadays? Who 
are the men who utter the most fervid praise 
of the Constitution of the United States and 
the constitutions of the states? They are the 
gentlemen who used to get behind those 
documents to play hide-and-seek with the 
people whom they pretended to serve. They 
are the men who entrenched themselves in the 
laws which they misinterpreted and misused. 
If now they are afraid that ''radicalism" will 



THE WAY TO RESUME 243 

sweep them away, — and I believe it will, — 
they have only themselves to thank. 

Yet how absurd is the charge that we who 
are demanding that our government be made 
representative of the people and responsive to 
their demands, — how fictitious and hypocritical 
is the charge that we are attacking the funda- 
mental principles of republican institutions! 
These very men who hysterically profess their 
alarm would declaim loudly enough on the 
Fourth of July of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence; they would go on and talk of those 
splendid utterances in our earliest state con- 
stitutions, which have been copied in all our 
later ones, taken from the Petition of Rights, 
or the Declaration of Rights, those great funda- 
mental documents of the struggle for liberty 
in England; and yet in these very documents 
we read such uncompromising statements as 
this: that, when at any time the people of a 
commonwealth find that their government is 
not suitable to the circumstances of their lives 
or the promotion of their liberties, it is their 
privilege to alter it at their pleasure, and alter 



244 THE NEW FREEDOM 

it in any degree. That is the foundation, that 
is the very central doctrine, that is the ground 
principle, of American institutions. 

I want you to read a passage from the Vir- 
ginia Bill of Rights, that immortal document 
which has been a model for declarations of 
liberty throughout the rest of the continent: 

That all power is vested in, and consequently 
derived from, the people; that magistrates are 
their trustees and servants, and at all times 
amenable to them. 

That government is, or ought to be, instituted 
for the common benefit, protection, and secu- 
rity of the people, nation, or community; of all 
the various modes and forms of government, 
that is the best which is capable of producing 
the greatest degree of happiness and safety, 
and is most effectually secured against the 
danger of mal-administration ; and that, when 
any government shall be found inadequate or 
contrary to these purposes, a majority of the 
community hath an indubitable, inalienable, 
and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish 
it, in such manner as shall be judged most 
conducive to the public weal. 

I have heard that read a score of times on 
the Fourth of July, but I never heard it read 



THE WAY TO RESUME 245 

where actual measures were being debated. 
No man who understands the principles upon 
which this RepubHc was founded has the 
shghtest dread of the gentle, — though very 
effective, — measures by which the people are 
again resuming control of their own affairs. 

Nor need any lover of liberty be anxious 
concerning the outcome of the struggle upon 
which we are now embarked. The victory is 
certain, and the battle is not going to be an 
especially sanguinary one. It is hardly going 
to be worth the name of a battle. Let me tell 
the story of the emancipation of one State, — 
New Jersey: 

It has surprised the people of the United 
States to find New Jersey at the front in enter- 
prises of reform. I, who have lived in New 
Jersey the greater part of my mature life, know 
that there is no state in the Union which, so 
far as the hearts and intelligence of its people 
are concerned, has more earnestly desired reform 
than has New Jersey. There are men who have 
been prominent in the affairs of the State who 



246 THE NEW FREEDOM 

again and again advocated with all the earnest- 
ness that was in them the things that we have 
at last been able to do. There are men in 
New Jersey who have spent some of the best 
energies of their lives in trying to win elections 
in order to get the support of the citizens of 
New Jersey for programs of reform. 

The people had voted for such things very 
often before the autumn of 1910, but the inter- 
esting thing is that nothing had happened. They 
were demanding the benefit of remedial measures 
such as had been passed in every progesssive 
state of the Union, measures which had proved 
not only that they did not upset the life of the 
communities to which they were applied but 
that they quickened every force and bettered 
every condition in those communities. But 
the people of New Jersey could not get them, 
and there had come upon them a certain pessi- 
mistic despair. I used to meet men who 
shrugged their shoulders and said: "What 
difference does it make how we vote? Nothing 
ever results from our votes." The force that 
is behind the new party that has recently been 



THE WAY TO RESUME 247 

formed, the so-called "Progressive Party," is 
a force of discontent with the old parties of 
the United States. It is the feeling that men 
have gone into blind alleys often enough, and 
that somehow there must be found an open road 
through which men may pass to some purpose. 

In the year 1910 there came a day when the 
people of New Jersey took heart to believe that 
something could be accomplished. I had no 
merit as a candidate for Governor, except that 
I said what I really thought, and the compli- 
ment that the people paid me was in believing 
that I meant what I said. Unless they had 
believed in the Governor whom they then 
elected, unless they had trusted him deeply and 
altogether, he could have done absolutely 
nothing. The force of the public men of a 
nation lies in the faith and the backing of the 
people of the country, rather than in any gifts 
of their own. In proportion as you trust them, 
in proportion as you back them up, in proportion 
as you lend them your strength, are they strong. 
The things that have happened in New Jersey 
since 1910 have happened because the seed was 



248 THE NEW FREEDOM 

planted in this fine fertile soil of confidence, of 
trust, of renewed hope. 

The moment the forces in New Jersey that 
had resisted reform realized that the people 
were backing new men who meant what they 
had said, they realized that they dare not resist 
them. It was not the personal force of the 
new officials; it was the moral strength of their 
backing that accomplished the extraordinary 
result. 

And what was accomplished? Mere justice 
to classes that had not been treated justly 
before. 

Every schoolboy in the State of New Jersey, 
if he cared to look into the matter, could com- 
prehend the fact that the laws applying to 
laboring-men with respect of compensation 
when they were hurt in their various employ- 
ments had originated at a time when society 
was organized very differently from the way 
in which it is organized now, and that because 
the law had not been changed, the courts were 
obliged to go blindly on administering laws 
which were cruelly unsuitable to existing con- 



THE WAY TO RESUME 249 

ditions, so that it was practically impossible 
for the workingmen of New Jersey to get 
justice from the courts; the legislature of the 
commonwealth had not come to their assistance 
with the necessary legislation. Nobody seri- 
ously debated the circumstances; everybody 
knew that the law was antiquated and impossi- 
ble; everybody knew that justice waited to 
be done. Very well, then, why wasn't it done? 
There was another thing that we wanted to 
do: We wanted to regulate our public service 
corporations so that we could get the proper 
service from them, and on reasonable terms. 
That had been done elsewhere, and where it 
had been done it had proved just as much for 
the benefit of the corporations themselves as 
for the benefit of the people. Of course it was 
somewhat difficult to convince the corporations. 
It happened that one of the men who knew the 
least about the subject was the president of 
the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. 
I have heard speeches from that gentleman that 
exhibited a total lack of acquaintance with the 
circumstances of our times. I have never 



250 THE NEW FREEDOM 

known ignorance so complete in its detail; and, 
being a man of force and ignorance, he naturally- 
set all his energy to resist the things that he did 
not comprehend. 

I am not interested in questioning the motives 
of men in such positions. I am only sorry that 
they don't know more. If they would only 
join the procession they would find themselves 
benefited by the healthful exercise, which, for 
one thing, would renew within them the capacity 
to learn which I hope they possessed when they 
were younger. We were not trying to do any- 
thing novel in New Jersey in regulating the 
Public Service Corporation; we were simply 
trying to adopt there a tested measure of public 
justice. We adopted it. Has anybody gone 
bankrupt since? Does anybody now doubt 
that it was just as much for the benefit of the 
Public Service Corporation as for the people 
of the State? 

Then there was another thing that we mod- 
estly desired: We wanted fair elections; we 
did not want candidates to buy themselves 
into office. That seemed reasonable. So we 



THE WAY TO RESUME 251 

adopted a law, unique in one particular, namely : 
that if you bought an office, you didn't get it. 
I admit that that is contrary to all commercial 
principles, but I think it is pretty good political 
doctrine. It is all very well to put a man in jail 
for buying an office, but it is very much better, 
besides putting him in jail, to show him that 
if he has paid out a single dollar for that office, 
he does not get it, though a huge majority voted 
for him. We reversed the laws of trade; when 
you buy something in politics in New Jersey, 
you do not get it. It seemed to us that that 
was the best way to discourage improper 
political argument. If your money does not 
produce the goods, then you are not tempted 
to spend your money. 

We adopted a Corrupt Practices Act, the 
reasonable foundation of which no man could 
question, and an Election Act, which every 
man predicted was not going to work, but which 
did work, — to the emancipation of the voters 
of New Jersey. 

All these things are now commonplaces with 
us. We like the laws that we have passed, 



252 THE NEW FREEDOM 

and no man ventures to suggest any material 
change in them. Why didn't we get them long 
ago? What hindered us? Why, because we had 
a closed government; not an open government. 
It did not belong to us. It was managed by 
little groups of men whose names we knew, 
but whom somehow we didn't seem able to 
dislodge. When we elected men pledged to 
dislodge them, they only went into partnership 
with them. Apparently what was necessary 
was to call in an amateur who knew so little 
about the game that he supposed that he was 
expected to do what he had promised to do. 

There are gentlemen who have criticised the 
Governor of New Jersey because he did not do 
certain things, — for instance, bring a lot of 
indictments. The Governor of New Jersey 
does not think it necessary to defend himself; 
but he would like to call attention to a very 
interesting thing that happened in his State: 
When the people had taken over control of the 
government, a curious change was wrought in 
the souls of a great many men; a sudden moral 
awakening took place, and we simply could not 



THE WAY TO RESUME 253 

find culprits against whom to bring indict- 
ments; it was like a Sunday school, the way 
they obeyed the laws. 

So I say, there is nothing very difficult about 
resuming our own government. There is noth- 
ing to appall us when we make up our minds 
to set about the task. "The way to resume is 
to resume," said Horace Greeley, once, when 
the country was frightened at a prospect which 
turned out to be not in the least frightful; it was 
at the moment of the resumption of specie 
payments for Treasury notes. The Treas- 
ury simply resumed, — there was not a ripple 
of danger or excitement when the day of resump- 
tion came around. 

It will be precisely so when the people resume 
control of their own government. The men 
who conduct the political machines are a small 
fraction of the party they pretend to represent, 
and the men who exercise corrupt influences 
upon them are only a small fraction of the busi- 
ness men of the country. What we are banded 
together to fight is not a party, is not a great 



254 THE NEW FREEDOM 

body of citizens; we have to fight only httle 
coteries, groups of men here and there, a few 
men, who subsist by deceiving us and cannot 
subsist a moment after they cease to deceive us. 
I had occasion to test the power of such a 
group in the State of New Jersey, and I had the 
satisfaction of discovering that I had been right 
in supposing that they did not possess any power 
at all. It looked as if they were entrenched in a 
fortress; it looked as if the embrasures of the 
fortress showed the muzzles of guns; but, as 
I told my good fellow-citizens, all they had to 
do was to press a little upon it and they would 
find that the fortress was a mere cardboard 
fabric; that it was a piece of stage property; 
that just so soon as the audience got ready to 
look behind the scenes they would learn that 
the army which had been marching and counter- 
marching in such terrifying array consisted of 
a single company that had gone in one wing and 
around and out at the other wing, and could 
have thus marched in procession for twenty- 
four hours. You only need about twenty -four 
men to do the trick. These men are impostors. 



THE WAY TO RESUME 255 

They are powerful only in proportion as we are 
susceptible to absurd fear of them. Their capi- 
tal is our ignorance and our credulity. 

To-day we are seeing something that some of 
us have waited all of our lives to see. We are 
witnessing a rising of the country. We are 
seeing a whole people stand up and decline any 
longer to be imposed upon. The day has come 
when men are saying to each other : "It doesn't 
make a peppercorn's difference to me what party 
I have voted with. I am going to pick out the 
men I want and the policies I want, and let 
the label take care of itself. I do not find any 
great dift'erence between my table of contents 
and the table of contents of those who have 
voted with the other party, and who, like me, 
are very much dissatisfied with the way in which 
their party has rewarded their faithfulness. 
They want the same things that I want, and I 
don't know of anything under God's heaven 
to prevent our getting together. We want the 
same things, we have the same faith in the 
old traditions of the American people, and we 
have made up our minds that we are going 



256 THE NEW FREEDOM 

to have now at last the reahty instead of the 
shadow." 

We Americans have been too long satisfied 
with merely going through the motions of 
government. We have been having a mock 
game. We have been going to the polls and 
saying: "This is the act of a sovereign people, 
but we won't be the sovereign yet; we will 
postpone that; we will wait until another time. 
The managers are still shifting the scenes; we 
are not ready for the real thing yet.'* 

My proposal is that we stop going through 
the mimic play; that we get out and translate 
the ideals of American poHtics into action; so 
that every man, when he goes to the polls on 
election day, will feel the thrill of executing an 
actual judgment, as he takes again into his own 
hands the great matters which have been too 
long left to men deputized by their own choice, 
and seriously sets about carrying into accom- 
plishment his own purposes. 



XI 

THE EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 

IN THE readjustments that are about to be 
undertaken in this country not one single 
legitimate or honest arrangement is going 
to be disturbed; but every impediment to busi- 
ness is going to be removed, every illegitimate 
kind of control is going to be destroyed. Every 
man who wants an opportunity and has the 
energy to seize it, is going to be given a chance. 
All that we are going to ask the gentlemen 
who now enjoy monopolistic advantages to do 
is to match their brains against the brains 
of those who will then compete with them. 
The brains, the energy, of the rest of us are to 
be set free to go into the game, — that is all. 
There is to be a general release of the capital, 
the enterprise, of millions of people, a general 
opening of the doors of opportunity. With 
what a spring of determination, with what a 

257 



258 THE NEW FREEDOM 

shout of jubilance, will the people rise to their 
emancipation ! 

I am one of those who beUeve that we have 
had such restrictions upon the prosperity of this 
country that we have not yet come into our 
own, and that by removing those restrictions 
we shall set free an energy which in our genera- 
tion has not been known. It is for that reason 
that I feel free to criticise with the utmost 
frankness these restrictions, and the means by 
which they have been brought about. I do not 
criticise as one without hope ; in describing con- 
ditions which so hamper, impede, and imprison, 
I am only describing conditions from which 
we are going to escape into a contrasting age. I 
believe that this is a time when there should be 
unqualified frankness. One of the distressing 
circumstances of our day is this: I cannot tell 
you how many men of business, how many 
important men of business, have communicated 
their real opinions about the situation in the 
United States to me privately and confidentially. 
They are afraid of somebody. They are afraid 
to make their real opinions known publicly; 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 259 

they tell them to me behind their hand. That 
is very distressing. That means that we are 
not masters of our own opinions, except when 
we vote, and even then we are careful to vote 
very privately indeed. 

It is alarming that this should be the case. 
Why should any man in free America be afraid 
of any other man? Or why should any man 
fear competition, — competition either with his 
fellow-countrymen or with anybody else on 
earth .f^ 

It is part of the indictment against the pro- 
tective policy of the United States that it has 
weakened and not enhanced the vigor of our 
people. American manufacturers who know 
that they can make better things than are made 
elsewhere in the world, that they can sell them 
cheaper in foreign markets than they are sold 
in these very markets of domestic manufacture, 
are afraid, — afraid to venture out into the 
great world on their own merits and their own 
skill. Think of it, a nation full of genius and 
yet paralyzed by timidity ! The timidity of the 
business men of America is to me nothing less 



260 THE NEW FREEDOM 

than amazing. They are tied to the apron 
strings of the government at Washington. 
They go about to seek favors. They say: "For 
pity's sake, don't expose us to the weather of 
the world; put some homeUke cover over us. 
Protect us. See to it that foreign men don't 
come in and match their brains with ours." 
And, as if to enhance this pecuHarity of ours, 
the strongest men amongst us get the biggest 
favors ; the men of pecuHar genius for organizing 
industries, the men who could run the in- 
dustries of any country, are the men who are 
most strongly intrenched behind the highest 
rates in the schedules of the tariff. They are 
so timid morally, furthermore, that they dare 
not stand up before the American people, but 
conceal these favors in the verbiage of the 
tariff schedule itself, — in "jokers." Ah! but 
it is a bitter joke when men who seek favors are 
so afraid of the best judgment of their fellow- 
citizens that they dare not avow what they 
take. 

Happily, the general revival of conscience 
in this country has not been confined to those 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 261 

who were consciously fighting special privilege. 
The awakening of conscience has extended to 
those who were enjoying special privileges, and 
I thank God that the business men of this 
country are beginning to see our economic 
organization in its true light, as a deadening 
aristocracy of privilege from which they them- 
selves must escape. The small men of this 
country are not deluded, and not all of the big 
business men of this country are deluded. 
Some men who have been led into wrong prac- 
tices, who have been led into the practices of 
monopoly, because that seemed to be the drift 
and inevitable method of supremacy, are just 
as ready as we are to turn about and adopt the 
process of freedom. For American hearts beat 
in a lot of these men, just as they beat under 
our jackets. They will be as glad to be free 
as we shall be to set them free. And then the 
splendid force which has lent itself to things 
that hurt us will lend itself to things that 
benefit us. 

And we, — we who are not great captains of 
industry or business, — shall do them more good 



262 THE NEW FREEDOM 

than we do now, even in a material way. If you 
have to be subservient, you are not even making 
the rich fellows as rich as they might be, because 
you are not adding your originative force to 
the extraordinary production of wealth in 
America. America is as rich, not as Wall 
Street, not as the financial centres in Chicago 
and St. Louis and San Francisco; it is as rich 
as the people that make those centres rich. 
And if those people hesitate in their enterprise, 
cower in the face of power, hesitate to originate 
designs of their own, then the very fountains 
which make these places abound in wealth are 
dried up at the source. By setting the little 
men of America free, you are not damaging 
the giants. 

It may be that certain things will happen, 
for monopoly in this country is carrying a body 
of water such as men ought not to be asked to 
carry. WTien by regulated competition, — that 
is to say, fair competition, competition that 
fights fair, — they are put upon their mettle, 
they will have to economize, and they cannot 
economize unless they get rid of that water. 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 263 

I do not kiK)w how to squeeze the water out, but 
they will get rid of it, if you will put them to 
the necessity. They will have to get rid of it, 
or those of us who don't carry tanks will outrun 
them in the race. Put all the business of 
America upon the footing of economy and 
efficiency, and then let the race be to the 
strongest and the swiftest. 

Our program is a program of prosperity; a 
program of prosperity that is to be a little 
more pervasive than the present prosperity, — 
and pervasive prosperity is more fruitful than 
that which is narrow and restrictive. I con- 
gratulate the monopolies of the United States 
that they are not going to have their way, 
because, quite contrary to their own theory, the 
fact is that the people are wiser than they are. 
The people of the United States understand 
the United States as these gentlemen do not, 
and if they will only give us leave, we will not 
only make them rich, but we will make them 
happy. Because, then, their conscience will 
have less to carry. I have lived in a state 
that was owned by a series of corporations. 



264 THE NEW FREEDOM 

They handed it about. It was at one time 
owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad; then 
it was owned by the Public Service Corpo- 
ration. It was owned by the Public Service 
Corporation when I was admitted, and that 
corporation has been resentful ever since that 
I interfered with its tenancy. But I really 
did not see any reason why the people should 
give up their own residence to so small a body 
of men to monopolize; and, therefore, when 
I asked them for their title deeds and they 
couldn't produce them, and there was no court 
except the court of public opinion to resort to, 
they moved out. Now they eat out of our 
hands; and they are not losing flesh either. 
They are making just as much money as they 
made before, only they are making it in a more 
respectable way. They are making it without 
the constant assistance of the legislature of 
the State of New Jersey. They are making 
it in the normal way, by supplying the people 
of New Jersey with the service in the way of 
transportation and gas and water that they 
really need. I do not believe that there are 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 265 

any thoughtful officials of the Public Service 
Corporation of New Jersey that now seriously 
regret the change that has come about. We 
liberated government in my state, and it is an 
interesting fact that we have not suffered one 
moment in prosperity. 

What we propose, therefore, in this pro- 
gram of freedom, is a program of general ad- 
vantage. Almost every monopoly that has 
resisted dissolution has resisted the real inter- 
ests of its own stockholders. Monopoly always 
checks development, weighs down natural pros- 
perity, pulls against natural advance. 

Take but such an everyday thing as a useful 
invention and the putting of it at the service 
of men. You know how prolific the American 
mind has been in invention; how much civiliza- 
tion has been advanced by the steamboat, the 
cotton-gin, the sewing-machine, the reaping- 
machine, the typewriter, the electric light, the 
telephone, the phonograph. Do you know, 
have you had occasion to learn, that there is 
no hospitality for invention nowadays? There 



266 THE NEW FREEDOM 

is no encouragement for you to set your wits 
at work to improve the telephone, or the camera, 
or some piece of machinery, or some mechanical 
process; you are not invited to find a shorter 
and cheaper way to make things or to perfect 
them, or to invent better things to take their 
place. There is too much money invested in 
old machinery; too much money has been spent 
advertising the old camera; the telephone 
plants, as they are, cost too much to permit 
their being superseded by something better. 
Wherever there is monopoly, not only is there 
no incentive to improve, but, improvement 
being costly in that it ''scraps" old machinery 
and destroys the value of old products, there 
is a positive motive against improvement. 
The instinct of monopoly is against novelty, 
the tendency of monopoly is to keep in use the 
old thing, made in the old way; its disposition 
is to "standardize" everything. Standardiza- 
tion may be all very well, — but suppose every- 
thing had been standardized thirty years ago, — 
we should still be writing by hand, by gas-hght, 
we should be without the inestimable aid of 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 267 

the telephone (sometimes, I admit, it is a 
nuisance), without the automobile, without 
wireless telegraphy. Personally, I could have 
managed to plod along without the aeroplane, 
and I could have been happy even without 
moving-pictures . 

Of course, I am not saying that all invention 
has been stopped by the growth of trusts, but 
I think it is perfectly clear that invention in 
many fields has been discouraged, that inventors 
have been prevented from reaping the full fruits 
of their ingenuity and industry, and that man- 
kind has been deprived of many comforts and 
conveniences, as well as of the opportunity of 
buying at lower prices. 

The damper put on the inventive genius of 
America by the trusts operates in half a dozen 
ways: The first thing discovered by the genius 
whose device extends into a field controlled by 
a trust is that he can't get capital to make and 
market his invention. If you want money to 
build your plant and advertise your product 
and employ your agents and make a market 
for it, where are you going to get it? The 



268 THE NEW FREEDOM 

minute you apply for money or credit, this 
proposition is put to you by the banks: *'This 
invention will interfere with the established 
processes and the market control of certain 
great industries. We are already financing 
those industries, their securities are in our 
hands; we will consult them." 

It may be, as a result of that consultation, 
you will be informed that it is too bad, but it 
will be impossible to "accommodate" you. 
It may be you will receive a suggestion that if 
you care to make certain arrangements with 
the trust, you will be permitted to manufacture. 
It may be you will receive an offer to buy your 
patent, the offer being a poor consolation dole. 
It may be that your invention, even if purchased, 
will never be heard of again. 

That last method of dealing with an invention, 
by the way, is a particularly vicious misuse 
of the patent laws, which ought not to allow 
property in an idea which is never intended 
to be realized. One of the reforms waiting to 
be undertaken is a revision of our patent laws. 

In any event, if the trust doesn't want you 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 269 

to manufacture your invention, you will not 
be allowed to, unless you have money of your 
own and are willing to risk it fighting the monop- 
olistic trust with its vast resources. I am 
generalizing the statement, but I could partic- 
ularize it. I could tell you instances where 
exactly that thing happened. By the combina- 
tion of great industries, manufactured products 
are not only being standardized, but they are 
too often being kept at a single point of develop- 
ment and efficiency. The increase of the power 
to produce in proportion to the cost of produc- 
tion is not studied in America as it used to be 
studied, because if you don't have to improve 
your processes in order to excel a competitor, 
if you are human you aren't going to improve 
your processes; and if you can prevent the 
competitor from coming into the field, then you 
can sit at your leisure, and, behind this wall 
of protection which prevents the brains of any 
foreigner competing with you, you can rest 
at your ease for a whole generation. 

Can any one who reflects on merely this atti- 
tude of the trusts toward invention fail to 



270 THE NEW FREEDOM 

understand how substantial, how actual, how 
great will be the effect of the release of the 
genius of our people to originate, improve, and 
perfect the instruments and circumstances of 
our lives? Who can say what patents now 
lying, unrealized, in secret drawers and pigeon- 
holes, will come to light, or what new inventions 
will astonish and bless us, when freedom is 
restored? 

Are you not eager for the time when the 
genius and initiative of all the people shall be 
called into the service of business? when new- 
comers with new ideas, new entries with new 
enthusiasms, independent men, shall be wel- 
comed? when your sons shall be able to look 
forward to becoming, not employees, but heads 
of some small, it may be, but hopeful, business, 
where their best energies shall be inspired by 
the knowledge that they are their own masters, 
with the paths of the world open before them? 
Have you no desire to see the markets opened to 
all? to see credit available in due proportion to 
every man of character and serious purpose 
who can use it safely and to advantage? to see 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 271 

business disentangled from its unholy alliance 
with politics? to see raw material released from 
the control of monopolists, and transportation 
facilities equalized for all? and every avenue 
of commercial and industrial activity levelled 
for the feet of all who would tread it? Surely, 
you must feel the inspiration of such a new 
dawn of liberty ! 

There is the great policy of conservation, for 
example; and I do not conceive of conservation 
in any narrow sense. There are forests to 
conserve, there are great water powers to con- 
serve, there are mines whose wealth should be 
deemed exhaustible, not inexhaustible, and 
whose resources should be safeguarded and pre- 
served for future generations. But there is 
much more. There are the lives and energies 
of the people to be physically safeguarded. 

You know what has been the embarrassment 
about conservation. The federal government 
has not dared relax its hold, because, not bona 
fide settlers, not men bent upon the legitimate 
development of great states, but men bent upon 



272 THE NEW FREEDOM 

getting into their own exclusive control great 
mineral, forest, and water resources, have stood 
at the ear of the government and attempted to 
dictate its policy. And the government of the 
United States has not dared relax its somewhat 
rigid policy because of the fear that these forces 
would be stronger than the forces of individual 
communities and of the public interest. What 
we are now in dread of is that this situation will 
be made permanent. Why is it that Alaska 
has lagged in her development? Why is it that 
there are great mountains of coal piled up in 
the shipping places on the coast of Alaska 
which the government at Washington will not 
permit to be sold.^^ It is because the government 
is not sure that it has followed all the intricate 
threads of intrigue by which small bodies of 
men have tried to get exclusive control of the 
coal fields of Alaska. The government stands 
itself suspicious of the forces by which it is 
surrounded. 

The trouble about conservation is that the 
government of the United States hasn't any 
policy at present. It is simply marking time. 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 273 

It is simply standing still. Reservation is not 
conservation. Simply to say, ** We are not going 
to do anything about the forests," when the 
country needs to use the forests, is not a 
practicable program at all. To say that the 
people of the great State of Washington can't 
buy coal out of the Alaskan coal fields doesn't 
settle the question. You have got to have that 
coal sooner or later. And if you are so afraid 
of the Guggenheims and all the rest of them that 
you can't make up your mind what your pohcies 
are going to be about those coal fields, how long 
are we going to wait for the government to 
throw off its fear? There can't be a working 
program until there is a free government. The 
day when the government is free to set about 
a policy of positive conservation, as distin- 
guished from mere negative reservation, will 
be an emancipation day of no small importance 
for the development of the country. 

But the question of conservation is a very 
much bigger question than the conservation of 
our natural resources; because in summing up 
our natural resources there is one great natural 



274 THE NEW FREEDOM 

resource which underlies them all, and seems 
to underlie them so deeply that we sometimes 
overlook it. I mean the people themselves. 

What would our forests be worth without 
vigorous and intelligent men to make use of 
them? Why should we conserve our natural 
resources, unless we can by the magic of industry 
transmute them into the wealth of the world .^^ 
What transmutes them into that wealth, if not 
the skill and the touch of the men who go 
daily to their toil and who constitute the great 
body of the American people? What I am 
interested in is having the government of the 
United States more concerned about human 
rights than about property rights. Property is 
an instrument of humanity; humanity isn't an 
instrument of property. And yet when you see 
some men riding their great industries as if 
they were driving a car of juggernaut, not look- 
ing to see what multitudes prostrate themselves 
before the car and lose their lives in the crushing 
effect of their industry, you wonder how long 
men are going to be permitted to think more 
of their machinery than they think of their 



EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS 275 

men. Did you never think of it, — men are 
cheap, and machinery is dear; many a supers 
intendent is dismissed for overdriving a dehcate 
machine, who wouldn't be dismissed for over- 
driving an overtaxed man. You can discard 
your man and replace him; there are others 
ready to come into his place; but you can't 
without great cost discard your machine and 
put a new one in its place. You are less apt, 
therefore, to look upon your men as the essential 
vital foundation part of your whole business. 
It is time that property, as compared with 
humanity, should take second place, not first 
place. We must see to it that there is no over- 
crowding, that there is no bad sanitation, that 
there is no unnecessary spread of avoidable 
diseases, that the purity of food is safeguarded, 
that there is every precaution against accident, 
that women are not driven to impossible tasks, 
nor children permitted to spend their energy 
before it is fit to be spent. The hope and 
elasticity of the race must be preserved; men 
must be preserved according to their individual 
needs, and not according to the programs of 



276 THE NEW FREEDOM 

industry merely. What is the use of having 
industry, if we perish in producing it? If we 
die in trying to feed ourselves, why should we 
eat? If we die trying to get a foothold in the 
crowd, why not let the crowd trample us sooner 
and be done with it? 1 1 tell you that there 
is beginning to beat in this nation a great 
pulse of irresistible sympathy which is going to 
transform the processes of government amongst 
us. The strength of America is proportioned 
only to the health, the energy, the hope, the 
elasticity, the buoyancy of the American people. 
Is not that the greatest thought that you can 
have of freedom, — the thought of it as a gift 
that shall release men and women from all that 
pulls them back from being their best and from 
doing their best, that shall liberate their energy 
to its fullest limit, free their aspirations till no 
bounds confine them, and fill their spirits with 
the jubilance of realizable hope? 



xn 

THE LIBERATION OF A PEOPLE's VITAL ENERGIES 

NO MATTER how often we think of it, 
the discovery of America must each 
time make a fresh appeal to our imag- 
inations. For centuries, indeed from the begin- 
ning, the face of Europe had been turned toward 
the east. All the routes of trade, every impulse 
and energy, ran from west to east. The 
Atlantic lay at the world's back-door. Then, 
suddenly, the conquest of Constantinople by 
the Turk closed the route to the Orient. Europe 
had either to face about or lack any outlet for 
her energies; the unknown sea at the west at 
last was ventured upon, and the earth learned 
that it was twice as big as it had thought. 
Columbus did not find, as he had expected, the 
civilization of Cathay; he found an empty 
continent. In that part of the world, upon that 
new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in 

277 



278 THE NEW FREEDOM 

its history, was thus afforded an opportunity 
to set up a new civilization ; here it was strangely 
privileged to make a new human experiment. 

Never can that moment of unique opportunity 
fail to excite the emotion of all who consider its 
strangeness and richness; a thousand fanciful 
histories of the earth might be contrived without 
the imagination daring to conceive such a 
romance as the hiding away of half the globe 
until the fulness of time had come for a new 
start in civilization. A mere sea captain's 
ambition to trace a new trade route gave way 
to a moral adventure for humanity. The race 
was to found a new order here on this delectable 
land, which no man approached without receiv- 
ing, as the old voyagers relate, you remember, 
sweet airs out of woods aflame with flowers and 
murmurous with the sound of pellucid waters. 
The hemisphere lay waiting to be touched with 
life, — life from the old centres of living, surely, 
but cleansed of defilement, and cured of weari- 
ness, so as to be fit for the virgin purity of a new 
bride. The whole thing springs into the imag- 
ination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 279 

marvel which once only in all history could 
be vouchsafed. 

One other thing only compares with it; only 
one other thing touches the springs of emotion 
as does the picture of the ships of Columbus 
drawing near the bright shores, — and that is 
the thought of the choke in the throat of the 
immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steer- 
age deck at the land where he has been taught 
to believe he in his turn shall find an earthly 
paradise, where, a free man, he shall forget the 
heartaches of the old life, and enter into the 
fulfilment of the hope of the world. For has 
not every ship that has pointed her prow west- 
ward borne hither the hopes of generation after 
generation of the oppressed of other lands? 
How always have men's hearts beat as they saw 
the coast of America rise to their view! How 
it has always seemed to them that the dweller 
there would at last be rid of kings, of privileged 
classes, and of all those bonds which had kept 
men depressed and helpless, and would there 
realize the full fruition of his sense of honest 
manhood, would there be one of a great body 



280 THE NEW FREEDOM 

of brothers, not seeking to defraud and deceive 
one another, but seeking to accompHsh the gen- 
eral good! 

What was in the writings of the men who 
founded America, — to serve the selfish interests 
of America? Do you find that in their writings? 
No; to serve the cause of humanity, to bring 
liberty to mankind. They set up their standards 
here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon 
of encouragement to all the nations of the world ; 
and men came thronging to these shores with 
an expectancy that never existed before, with 
a confidence they never dared feel before, and 
found here for generations together a haven of 
peace, of opportunity, of equality. 

God send that in the complicated state of 
modern affairs we may recover the standards 
and repeat the achievements of that heroic age ! 

For fife is no longer the comparatively simple 
thing it was. Our relations one with another 
have been profoundly modified by the new 
agencies of rapid communication and trans- 
portation, tending swiftly to concentrate life, 
widen communities, fuse interests, and compli- 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 281 

cate all the processes of living. The individual 
is dizzily swept about in a thousand new whirl- 
pools of activities. Tyranny has become more 
subtle, and has learned to wear the guise of 
mere industry, and even of benevolence. Free- 
dom has become a somewhat different matter. 
It cannot, — eternal principle that it is, — it 
cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new 
aspects. Perhaps it is only revealing its deeper 
meaning. 

What is liberty .f^ 

I have long had an image in my mind of what 
constitutes liberty. Suppose that I were build- 
ing a great piece of powerful machinery, and 
suppose that I should so awkwardly and unskil- 
fully assemble the parts of it that every time 
one part tried to move it would be interfered 
with by the others, and the whole thing would 
buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the 
several parts would consist in the best possible 
assembling and adjustment of them all, would 
it not-f^ If you want the great piston of the 
engine to run with absolute freedom, give it 



282 THE NEW FREEDOM 

absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment with 
the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, 
not because it is let alone or isolated, but because 
it has been associated most skilfully and carefully 
with the other parts of the great structure. 

What it liberty? You say of the locomotive 
that it runs free. What do you mean? You 
mean that its parts are so assembled and 
adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, 
and that it has perfect adjustment. We say 
of a boat skimming the water with light foot, 
"How free she runs," when we mean, how 
perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the 
wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath 
out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw 
her head up into the wind and see how she will 
halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver 
and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly 
she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of 
the sea. She is free only when you have let 
her fall off again and have recovered once more 
her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey 
and cannot defy. 

Human freedom consists in perfect adjust- 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 283 

ments of human interests and human activities 
and human energies. 

Now, the adjustments necessary between 
individuals, between individuals and the com- 
plex institutions amidst which they live, 
and between those institutions and the gov- 
ernment, are infinitely more intricate to-day 
than ever before. No doubt this is a tire- 
some and roundabout way of saying the 
thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get 
somewhat clearly in our mind what makes all 
the trouble to-day. Life has become complex; 
there are many more elements, more parts, 
to it than ever before. And, therefore, it 
is harder to keep everything adjusted, — and 
harder to find out where the trouble lies when 
the machine gets out of order. 

You know that one of the interesting things \ 
that Mr. Jefferson said in those early days of 
simplicity which marked the beginnings of our 
government was that the best government 
consisted in as little governing as possible. 
And there is still a sense in which that is true. 
It is still intolerable for the government to 



284 THE NEW FREEDOM 

interfere with our individual activities except 
where it is necessary to interfere with them in 
order to free them. But I feel confident that 
if Jefferson were living in our day he would see 
what we see: that the individual is caught in 
a great confused nexus of all sorts of complicated 
circumstances, and that to let him alone is to 
leave him helpless as against the obstacles with 
which he has to contend; and that, therefore, 
law in our day must come to the assistance of 
the individual. It must come to his assistance 
to see that he gets fair play ; that is all, but that 
is much. Without the watchful interference, 
the resolute interference, of the government, 
there can be no fair play between individuals 
and such powerful institutions as the trusts. 
Freedom to-day is something more than being 
let alone. The program of a government of 
freedom must in these days be positive, not 
negative merely. 



Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of 
it, are we preserving freedom in this land of 
ours, the hope of all the earth .^ 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 285 

Have we, inheritors of this continent and of 
the ideals to which the fathers consecrated it, — 
have we maintained them, reahzing them, as 
each generation must, anew? Are we, in the 
consciousness that the hfe of man is pledged 
to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving 
still to bear aloft the standards of liberty and 
hope, or, disillusioned and defeated, are we 
feehng the disgrace of having had a free field 
in which to do new things and of not having 
done them? 

The answer must be, I am sure, that we have 
been in a fair way of failure, — tragic failure. 
And we stand in danger of utter failure yet 
except we fulfil speedily the determination we 
have reached, to deal with the new and subtle 
tyrannies according to their deserts. Don't 
deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power 
of the great interests which now dominate 
our development. They are so great that it is 
almost an open question whether the govern- 
ment of the United States can dominate them 
or not. Go one step further, make their organ- 
ized power permanent, and it may be too late 



286 THE NEW FREEDOM 

to turn back. -The roads diverge at the point 
where we stand. They stretch their vistas 
out to regions where they are very far separated 
from one another; at the end of one is the old 
tiresome scene of government tied up with 
special interests; and at the other shines the 
liberating light of individual initiative, of indi- 
vidual liberty, of individual freedom, the light 
of untrammeled enterprise. I believe that 
that light shines out of the heavens itself that 
God has created. I believe in human liberty 
as I believe in the wine of life. There is no 
salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions 
of industrial masters. Guardians have no place 
in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed 
by trustees has no prospect of endurance. 
Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. 
If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit 
at the helm of the government. I do not expect 
to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are 
men in this country big enough to own the 
government of the United States, they are 
going to own it; what we have to determine now 
is whether we are big enough, whether we are 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 287 

men enough, whether we are free enough, to 
take possession again of the government which 
is our own. We haven't had free access to 
it, our minds have not touched it by way of 
guidance, in half a generation, and now we are 
engaged in nothing less than the recovery of 
what was made with our own hands, and acts 
only by our delegated authority. 

I tell you, when you discuss the question of 
the tariffs and of the trusts, you are discussing 
the very lives of yourselves and your children. 
I believe that I am preaching the very cause of 
some of the gentlemen whom I am opposing 
when I preach the cause of free industry in the 
United States, for I think they are slowly 
girding the tree that bears the inestimable 
fruits of our life, and that if they are permitted 
to gird it entirely nature will take her revenge 
and the tree will die.j~- 

I do not believe that America is securely great 
because she has great men in her now. America 
is great in proportion as she can make sure of 
having great men in the next generation. She 
is rich in her unborn children; rich, that is to 



288 THE NEW FREEDOM 

say, if those unborn children see the sun in a 
day of opportunity, see the sun when they are 
free to exercise their energies as they will. 
If they open their eyes in a land where there is 
no special privilege, then we shall come into 
a new era of American greatness and American 
liberty; but if they open their eyes in a country 
where they must be employees or nothing, if 
they open their eyes in a land of merely regulated 
monopoly, where all the conditions of industry 
are determined by small groups of men, then 
they will see an America such as the founders 
of this Republic would have wept to think of. 
The only hope is in the release of the forces 
which philanthropic trust presidents want to 
monopolize. Only the emancipation, the free- 
ing and heartening of the vital energies of all 
the people will redeem us. In all that I may 
have to do in public affairs in the United 
States I am going to think of towns such as I 
have seen in Indiana, towns of the old American 
pattern, that own and operate their own indus- 
tries, hopefully and happily. My thought is 
going to be bent upon the multiplication of 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 289 

towns of that kind and the prevention of the 
concentration of industry in this country in 
such a fashion and upon such a scale that towns 
that own themselves will be impossible. You 
know what the vitality of America consists of. 
Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in 
Chicago; it will not be sapped by anything that 
happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America 
lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise 
of the people throughout the land; in the 
efficiency of their factories and in the richness 
of the fields that stretch beyond the borders 
of the town; in the wealth which they extract 
from nature and originate for themselves 
through the inventive genius characteristic of 
all free American communities. 

That is the wealth of America, and if America 
discourages the locality, the community, the 
self-contained town, she will kill the nation. 
A nation is as rich as her free communities; 
she is not as rich as her capital city or her 
metropolis. The amount of money in Wall 
Street is no indication of the wealth of the 
American people. That indication can be found 



290 THE NEW FREEDOM 

only in the fertility of the American mind and 
the productivity of American industry every- 
where throughout the United States. If Amer- 
ica were not rich and fertile, there would be no 
money in Wall Street. If Americans were not 
vital and able to take care of themselves, the 
great money exchanges would break down. 
The welfare, the very existence of the nation, 
rests at last upon the great mass of the people; 
its prosperity depends at last upon the spirit 
in which they go about their work in their 
several communities throughout the broad land. 
In proportion as her towns and her country- 
sides are happy and hopeful will America realize 
the high ambitions which have marked her 
in the eyes of all the world. 

The welfare, the happiness, the energy and 
spirit of the men and women who do the daily 
work in our mines and factories, on our rail- 
roads, in our offices and ports of trade, on our 
farms and on the sea, is the underlying necessity 
of all prosperity. There can be nothing whole- 
some unless their life is wholesome; there can 
be no contentment unless they are contented. 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 291 

Their physical welfare affects the soundness of 
the whole nation. How would it suit the 
prosperity of the United States, how would it 
suit business, to have a people that went every 
day sadly or sullenly to their work? How 
would the future look to you if you felt that the 
aspiration had gone out of most men, the 
confidence of success, the hope that they might 
improve their condition? Do you not see that 
just so soon as the old self-confidence of America, 
just so soon as her old boasted advantage of 
individual liberty and opportunity, is taken 
away, all the energy of her people begins to 
subside, to slacken, to grow loose and pulpy, 
without fibre, and men simply cast about to 
see that the day does not end disastrously 
with them? 

So we must put heart into the people by 
taking the heartlessness out of politics, business, 
and industry. We have got to make politics 
a thing in which an honest man can take his 
part with satisfaction because he knows that 
his opinion will count as much as the next man's, 
and that the boss and the interests have been 



292 THE NEW FREEDOM 

dethroned. Business we have got to untram- 
mel, aboHshing tariff favors, and railroad dis- 
crimination, and credit denials, and all forms of 
unjust handicaps against the little man. Indus- 
try we have got to humanize, — not through 
the trusts, — but through the direct action of 
law guaranteeing protection against dangers 
and compensation for injuries, guaranteeing 
sanitary conditions, proper hours,\ the right to 
\ organize, and all the other things which the 
conscience of the country demands as the 
workingman's right. We have got to cheer and 
inspirit our people with the sure prospects of 
social justice and due reward, with the vision of 
the open gates of opportunity for all. We have 
got to set the energy and the initiative of this 
great people absolutely free, so that the future 
of America will be greater than the past, so that 
the pride of America will grow with achieve- 
ment, so that America will know as she advances 
from generation to generation that each brood 
of her sons is greater and more enlightened than 
that which preceded it, know that she is fulfill- 
ing the promise that she has made to mankind. 



A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES 293 

Such is the vision of some of us who now come 
to assist in its reahzation. For we Democrats 
would not have endured this long burden of 
exile if we had not seen a vision. We could 
have traded; we could have got into the game; 
we could have surrendered and made terms; 
we could have played the role of patrons to 
the men who wanted to dominate the interests 
of the country, — and here and there gentlemen 
who pretended to be of us did make those 
arrangements. They couldn't stand privation. 
You never can stand it unless you have within 
you some imperishable food upon which to 
sustain life and courage, the food of those 
visions of the spirit where a table is set before 
us laden with palatable fruits, the fruits of hope, 
the fruits of imagination, those invisible things 
of the spirit which are the only things upon 
which we can sustain ourselves through this 
weary world without fainting. We have carried 
in our minds, after you had thought you had 
obscured and blurred them, the ideals of those 
men who first set their foot upon America, 
those little bands who came to make a foothold 



294 THE NEW FREEDOM 

in the wilderness, because the great teeming 
nations that they had left behind them had 
forgotten what human liberty was, liberty of 
thought, liberty of religion, liberty of residence, 
liberty of action. 

Since their day the meaning of liberty has 
deepened. But it has not ceased to be a funda- 
mental demand of the human spirit, a funda- 
mental necessity for the life of the soul. And 
the day is at hand when it shall be realized on 
this consecrated soil, • — a New Freedom, — a 
Liberty widened and deepened to match the 
broadened life of man in modern America, 
restoring to him in very truth the control of his 
government, throwing wide all gates of lawful 
enterprise, unfettering his energies, and warming 
the generous impulses of his heart, — a process 
of release, emancipation, and inspiration, full 
of a breath of life as sweet and wholesome as 
the airs that filled the sails of the caravels of 
Columbus and gave the promise and boast 
of magnificent. Opportunity in which America 
dare not fail. 



THE COITNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



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